chirantha7777
05-08-2009, 09:55 PM
A hard drive is data storage device mainly constructed with metal. People keep there valued work in these storage devices but when the drive fails... People will lose a lot of data. One may ask why this happens..
Obviously there are failures in IC's and the fact of power surges that will destroy your hard drive but most commonly its heat... that’s right.. temperature determines the HDD life time from 1 year to even 30 years of 24X7 running.
Why? As HDD's are made with metal. When the metal heats up it stretches and expands leading to higher wear and tare. The best way to stop your HDD from heating up is to install a big fan in the front Fan holder in your system case (called as intake fan). This will lower the temperature of the HDD and improving HDD lifetime.
The second reason for Hard Drive failures is simply On/Off's of the PC. HDD manufacturers say the maximum number of On/Off's guaranteed is 50,000. One thing I should say is if you have set your Power Options to turn off HDD after X minutes YOU WILL destroy your hard drive. Not only that putting the computer in Sleep and Waking it up more constantly is a VERY bad idea.
Best way is to turn on the PC in the morning, do your work and turn it off. Don't On/Off all the time.. you waste money.
Use the Free Software called “HD Tune” to monitor you drive. It will allow you to read the SMART (Self Monitoring Analasys and Reporting Technology) data as well. What is smart? Almost every HDD will keep track of performance data inside them. Such as Seek error count, bad sectors etc. Use the HD Tune program to see these values. Also.. if your motherboard came up saying “SMART Failure” this means the HDD SMART data is predicting an immanent Hard Drive failure!
Obviously there are failures in IC's and the fact of power surges that will destroy your hard drive but most commonly its heat... that’s right.. temperature determines the HDD life time from 1 year to even 30 years of 24X7 running.
Why? As HDD's are made with metal. When the metal heats up it stretches and expands leading to higher wear and tare. The best way to stop your HDD from heating up is to install a big fan in the front Fan holder in your system case (called as intake fan). This will lower the temperature of the HDD and improving HDD lifetime.
The second reason for Hard Drive failures is simply On/Off's of the PC. HDD manufacturers say the maximum number of On/Off's guaranteed is 50,000. One thing I should say is if you have set your Power Options to turn off HDD after X minutes YOU WILL destroy your hard drive. Not only that putting the computer in Sleep and Waking it up more constantly is a VERY bad idea.
Best way is to turn on the PC in the morning, do your work and turn it off. Don't On/Off all the time.. you waste money.
Use the Free Software called “HD Tune” to monitor you drive. It will allow you to read the SMART (Self Monitoring Analasys and Reporting Technology) data as well. What is smart? Almost every HDD will keep track of performance data inside them. Such as Seek error count, bad sectors etc. Use the HD Tune program to see these values. Also.. if your motherboard came up saying “SMART Failure” this means the HDD SMART data is predicting an immanent Hard Drive failure!