After a short
period, where hard drive failures appeared to be on the decline, I have
witnessed a large number of failures recently in drives of only 3 to 4 years of
age. Unfortunately, the constant pressure on computer pricing has led a large
number of companies to purchase drives from the supplier with the lowest price.
While most of the
recent failures appeared to happen to Maxtor drives, I have had failures in Fujitsu,
IBM and Western Digital drives as well. After viewing a number of statistical
failure reviews it appears that Seagate has the best reliability rating at the
moment. On average their drives seem to cost about $10 more than most drives of
a similar size but I would say that improved reliability is more than worth the
extra $10 price tag.
The main
complication in determining drive reliability is that many manufacturers
produce multiple lines of drives and some models may be more reliable than
others. Most drive reliability charting compares failure rates across the
complete line of each manufacturer but does not take into account individual
model statistics. These failure rates may be known to the manufacturer but they
prefer not to reveal them while they try to correct the problems in the
manufacturing process.
Many people refer
to the computer itself as the Hard Drive. In reality, it is a component about
4x6 inches in size and about an inch thick. It stores the Window Operating
System, all of your programs and all of your files. It is composed of a series
of individual disks and read/write heads that rotate at from 5400 to 10000 RPM.
The distance
between the heads and the disks is a fraction of the thickness of a human hair
so any substantial physical jarring can cause the heads to collide with the
disks resulting in damage or even complete failure of the hard drive. Routine
wear and tear can also cause the drives to fail. This is significant because a
lot of people leave their computers on 24 hours a day. Most consumer level hard
drives are not meant for this level of use. Hard drives run rather hot and 24
hour a day usage will eventually wear them out.
There are a
number of things that you can do to help your hard working hard drive last a
little longer:
1) Turn them off
when you are not using them.
2) Defragment
your drive monthly to make sure the drive heads don’t have to work overtime
retrieving files.
3) If you have a
choice, purchase a more reliable drive in the first place and hopefully avoid
the failures.
Some hard drives
have built in failure detection software. If the drive experiences failure
symptoms and your computer reports: Hard Drive Failure is Imminent, you
need to react to this sort of warning quickly. You may have only a matter of a
few hours or days at best before the drive fails completely. You need to backup
your e-mail and personal files and replace the hard drive quickly if this
message appears. At other times you may experience other Windows errors which
may or may not indicate drive failure as a possible source. In either case,
hoping it will just go away is usually not a good option.
With the advent
of DVD Writers and large capacity USB Flash Drives, backing up personal files has
become a relatively simple process. Microsoft Office users frequently store
their files in My Documents. Keeping all of your personal files in one
place makes it easier to back them up. Unfortunately Microsoft has chosen to
store certain files, most commonly e-mail, in obscure places. These folders in
many cases are even hidden to prevent users from accidentally damaging them.
I prefer to keep
all of these files in one location so that they can be easily backed up in a
single process. To do this I usually create a folder called My E-Mail
under the My Documents folder. Then within the e-mail program of your
choice you can direct the program to move your e-mail to this new location
where it can be backed up.
To do this in
Outlook Express:
Select: Tools / Options / Maintenance
/ Store Folder
Then select Change
and browse to your newly created My E-Mail folder and click OK to exit the
program. When you go completely out of and return to Outlook Express it will
relocate your email folders to the new location.
To do this in
Microsoft Outlook:
You must
physically move the Outlook.pst file to the newly created My E-Mail folder
using Windows Explorer. When you go back into Microsoft Outlook it will tell
you the file is missing. You can then browse to locate the new folder and
redirect it to the new location.
Once you have
centralized your files you can back them up with a simple copy and paste of
your My Documents folder to a blank DVD or