The hard drive is an essential component part of any computer. While storage devices like floppies have become out of date today, hard drive has managed to survive the test of time. The wide acceptance of the hard drive as a storage media can be attributed not just for its huge storage capacity, but also due to its high reliability as well. Since your hard drive is safely locked inside the CPU, you need not worry too much about it unlike other storage devices such as optical or USB storage media.
Although your hard drive might not be too sensitive, it is still an electronic component that cannot withstand rough handling. Since a hard drive usually contains important data, the user needs to follow certain basic steps to avoid hard drive crash and subsequent loss of data.
Tips to Avoid Hard Drive Crash
In order to protect your hard drive from crashing, there are a few precautionary steps that you need to exercise. If you are careful to avoid the following mistakes, in more than 90% of the cases you could have your hard drive protected against damage:
1. Wear and Tear: Theoretically, your hard drive is supposed to live for 50 years. But due to rough handling, the life span of these hard drives is usually just 3 to 5 years. Unlike your optical drives which uses laser beams for the process of reading and writing contents, your hard drive uses the process of magnetisation.
Hard drive uses read/write head moving over its platters in order to write content on the hard drive or read from it. The gap between these read/write heads and the platters is just a few nanometres. So, with use, the head might come in contact with the platters causing friction. Due to this mechanical action, your hard drive might crash with time.
Precaution: The maximum wear and tear happens during initial start up of your computer. So, when you take a short break from work, do not switch off your computer. Although, it could help you save power, it also results in wear and tear. So, try to switch off the computer, only when you would not be using it for more considerable amount of time.
2. Environment: Heat and humidity could damage your hard drive. Similarly, accumulation of dust on it could also lead to damage. Usually companies back up data on hard drives and store them away in a dusty and hot storage room. This would not serve the purpose of back up since your hard drive might have crashed by the time you require the back up stored on these drives.
Precaution: Hard drive produced heat due to spinning of the platters. Computer has heat sync and fan mechanism adjacent to it in order to cool it off. Make sure the cooling mechanism is functioning properly. Also, store your hard drive in low temperature and low humid conditions. Even though hard drive is located inside the CPU, keep you computer in a dust free environment since the dust can always enter through the vent present on the CPU.
3. Computer Virus: A computer virus is a software program that could crash your operating system. Although, a virus cannot directly damage a hard drive, it has indirect effects on the hard drive functionality. Whenever your Operating System (OS) is crashed due to virus, you would be required to reinstall it. Constantly deleting partitions and reinstalling operating system, could crash the hard drive in a long run.
Precaution: Use an updated version of anti-virus software available in the market. Do not frequently change the hard drive partitions or perform reinstallation.
4. Other Factors: When the computer falls down or is moved from one place to another, hard drive can be damaged due to head crash. Similarly, electrostatic discharge also plays an important role in the damage of hard drive.
Precaution: Avoid jerks or movement of your computer. Even when travelling with your computer, make sure to pack it with proper padding that would avoid your jerks and head crash. Similarly, avoid electrostatic discharge by discharging the charges on your body through grounding before touching the hard drive.
Although, there are certain external factors such as manufacturing defect that could crash your hard drive in spite of careful handling by the users, the probability of such occurrences is a rarity. So, exercise proper care so that your hard drive could enjoy a long life and protect all your data!