5 Tips to Maintain Your Hard Drives

Overview of Hard Drive

Like all things mortal, hard drives too, sooner or later, meet their end. A typical hard drive can last around six years; however, only about half of the hard drives make it to their sixth year. At times, a premature hard drive death or two results from a manufacturing defect, but a majority of the crashes can be traced to mishandling and not taking proper care of the storage devices.

Some of you might question as to why hard drives would require any maintenance in the first place since they are affixed securely to the internal circuitry of a computer. You’d be surprised to know that in stark contrast with the common perception, hard drives mandate that they be taken care of from time to time.

How to Take Care of Hard Drives for Longer Use

Here are a few ways you can take good care of hard drive and ensure that it hits the six-year mark too:-

#1) Physical Damage

Physical trauma is, perhaps, the fastest and the easiest way you can cause permanent damage to a hard drive. Much to your surprise, a hard drive is not as resilient as it appears. The drive possesses multiple moving parts that can stop functioning or create drive recognition problems at even the slightest of disturbance.

Take additional care not to accidentally damage the drive when it is in motion as it is susceptible to maximum damage when the system is powered on. Your best way out to evade damage is never to detach the hard drive from its computer casing; if you need to transfer it to your drive to another PC, you must handle the drive as gently and swiftly as possible.

Also, try not to jostle or accidentally kick your computer case while it is powered on. Hard drives installed in laptops bring in a little respite for you since they are designed to be sturdy owing to the portability requirements they need to tend to.

#2) Excessive Heat

Heat buildup can cause massive damage to computer circuitry. Specifically, hard drives are very susceptible to heat-induced damage. You must refer to the optimal operating temperature range for your drive and maintain it strictly in order not to lose all your precious data to a heat-induced drive crash.

As long as you operate within the confines of the permissible operating temperature range, you should be safe. Ensure that there is adequate room for air circulation to your CPU.

Avoid blocking the air vents on the CPU body so as to facilitate proper cooling of the hard drive and the internal circuitry. Also, do not allow dust to clog any of the vents, lest you might be unknowingly choking your hard drive to death.

#3) File Fragmentation

File fragmentation can play in the damage to your hard drive too. The damage may not be immediately visible at first; however, with the passage of time, the effects of the damage can start becoming more prominent. Fragmented data can exert the hard drive unnecessarily every time it needs to fetch in some information.

It is best that you perform defragmentation of your hard drive, especially if you are not using an NTFS or FAT32-type drive.

#4) Frequent Power On/Off

Rebooting over and over again can wreak havoc on your hard drive. Even though it is not right for you to keep your system running incessantly even when not in use for extended durations, you must not resolve to turning it on and off unnecessarily.

Turn it off only if you are stepping away for more than twenty-four hours at a stretch. A standby or hibernation mode can work the job if you are not using your system only for a few hours. Use the sleep mode for all other scenarios.

#5) Power Fluctuations

Frequent voltage fluctuations can harm your hard drive irreparably too. If you not that lucky, surges lasting for as less as a few nanoseconds can be enough to completely char out your hard drive. Use a surge protector of adequate strength to stay impervious to these uncalled-for fluctuations on the lookout to cause damage.

Also, you should buy hard drives only from trusted manufacturers such as WD to ensure good quality and longer operational spans.