A common part of all computer systems is the hard drive. The hard drive contains all of the data in your computer and acts as the storage of all your files. The problem is that hard drives also have a set lifespan. They can break down after some time making you have a need to contact computer repair or even replacement when they do.
Because of the criticality of this component, it would be important for you to increase the life of your hard drive. By increasing the hard drive life, you would be able to lessen IT support calls, and may even be able to reuse the hard drive on another computer setup in the future.
Here are some tips that you could use for increasing hard drive life:
Ensure Proper Ventilation
A common cause of hard drive failure is overheating. When you are running plenty of computer services, these would all cause a strain on the various components of the pc. If you do not have proper ventilation, this may ultimately lead into overheating and damage to the parts.
Ask your IT Support team to check and even reconfigure the layout of your computer, if you think that it is not getting the proper ventilation for it to work efficiently.
Avoid Bumps and Shocks on the Desktop or Laptop
Hard drives are fragile items. A few bumps and hard drops could cause the drive to fail. Unfortunately, some damages to the hard drive are very difficult to fix even for expert computer repair shops. That is why you may want to avoid bumps and shocks to the laptop or even desktop as much as possible.
A tip for this is that when building your computer, you should ask the computer services team to properly secure the drive so that it would be further protected from the inevitable bumps and hits that the desktop or laptop may suffer from.
Have an Array of Hard Drives
You may also want to increase the lifespan of individual hard drives by having a set of them instead of just an individual drive. By having a an array of drives you would be able to distribute the usage and storage between multiple disks instead of a single device.
You may want to contact an IT Support team to help in setting up your array of hard drives as this may be a bit complicated for novice users.
Karen is a contributing member of MailSure-It.com which provides IT Support and IT Support Manchester.
How to Increase Hard Drive Life,
Olawale Daniel
Aug 03. 2011
This is a very nice article on improving the lives of our computer’s hard drives. Thanks Karen for the information shared 🙂
techGALAXY
Aug 03. 2011
Thanks for sharing… does defragmenting a disk affects the hard drive life??? if so , how?
TechCrates
Aug 03. 2011
It depends … check this out http://forums.anandtech.com/archive/index.php/t-274833.html and http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/6741-defrag-does-it-decrease-the-life-of-your-drive/
techGALAXY
Aug 07. 2011
thanx for those links admin!! 🙂
android phones review
Aug 03. 2011
who run his computer most of the day, it need to proper cooling system (like extra cooling fan) for his desktop or laptop. for laptop, it you should shut down for a few times it, when u have no work on it. to keep overload your hard drive is not good. virus and slow pc is not good for your hard drive lasting. all this is my concept. good writing.
Priyangshu
Aug 03. 2011
Nice tips bro ! Does frequent formatting of hard drives destroys the hard drive ??
TechCrates
Aug 03. 2011
Frequent formatting decreases the life of the hard drive … Once in 3-4 months or earlier if there is absolute necessity is recommended
Oracle
Aug 04. 2011
Thanks for sharing, i appreciate your efforts.
Anna from Cosmetic Dentistry
Aug 04. 2011
Good and easy to understand issue/tips, thanks Karen!
I’ve been doing a lot of hard disk defragmentation before but I have stopped doing it nowadays. Thanks for the link on that.
Bob
Aug 05. 2011
great …i am always troubling by this error ..hard drive burst….after all finally i found the solution ..ill use all the thing u said ..nice post keep uploading…
Theresa Torres
Aug 07. 2011
Hi Karen,
I recently brought my PC to the repair shop and the problem was the hard drive needs to be replaced. I think it was because of frequent formatting.
Thanks for sharing these tips. I’ll be more careful this time. Having a set of hard drives sounds like a good idea. I think I’ll get one or two spares.
Have a nice day!
Sandipan Mukherjee
Sep 07. 2011
Thanks for sharing. This is a very useful article.
Denver Real Estate
Oct 31. 2011
It was certainly interesting to know more on how to increase the life of hard disk. The post is very detailed and one don’t have to be a techie to understand this topic on hard disk.