Executive Summary By Phil Dotree
Getting the Most from Your Hard Drive
Here are a few tips to increase your hard drive's life and avoid some of the common pitfalls of hard drive ownership.
- Defragment your drive regularly.
- Watch heat and vibration, they're two of a hard drive's worst enemies. Many offices don't consider heat to be that dangerous; after all, computers have fans, right? Also, keeping a computer near any source of vibration (such as a large copy machine) is a bad idea; the vibrations can throw off the delicate internal mechanisms of a drive.
- Humidity is also bad news; ideally, your computer should be kept in a clean, open, dry area at a good room temperature
- Professional data recovery can cost upwards of a thousand dollars, and it's much cheaper to periodically back up your data and check your backups for consistency. For home users, consider investing in an external hard drive.
- Don't shut your computer down without doing it properly. Hitting the power button is a huge shock to your computer.
- For a delicately tuned machine like a hard drive, suddenly cutting all power can be disastrous and can fragment files or permanently damage your hard drive.
- Finally, keep your computer on a regulated power supply. Power surges (even imperceptible ones) can cause your hard drive to break down, and big ones can send the heads crashing into the platters which store the information, in some cases permanently damaging your drive.
If you follow some common sense rules, you should get a lot of life from your hard drive, and overall increased performance from your computer.
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