PART 1
Its inevitable and its going to happen to you... eventually.
If you've ever had a hard drive fail you're in good company. Despite all efforts and good practise hard drives do eventually fail. With a few simple steps we can protect ourselves from the fallout of drive failure.
First off we should have at least three backups of our data. One of which is preferably off site or in the cloud. Having an offsite backup will avoid all three copies perishing in a nasty house fire or such. Now it is easy to say, but often making large backups is time consuming and costly, so we don't always do it.
The best measure of protection is prevention and most modern hard drives have
S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) monitoring built in. This technology is designed to continually monitor and warn a user of impending drive failure while there is still time to take action. Given this you would be forgiven for thinking you couldn't do any more to help - but that's wrong!
There are other simple ways you can insure a healthy disk and a longer life for your hard drive. First off we need to abide to some good practise... Often power outage or even mishandling of the drive will cause failure, so we need to insure we shut down or dismount the drive correctly while in use. Also treat your drive with care, if you were to drop it - you should expect problems its not a punch bag nor will it bounce, so try not to bash it about.
We can maintain our drives by checking disk and de-fragmenting on a regular basis. Checking disk will help detect file system errors and also find physical errors or bad sectors on the disks surface. When detected check disk will attempt to handle these physical errors and recover any readable data while further isolating the problem. De-fragmenting on the other hand helps to prevent these errors and to keep your drive organised and tidy. A tidy drive means less pressure on the drive head and less wear on the drive itself. Windows can check disk and defrag out of the box, however for a more advanced solution I would recommend a programme called Defraggler.
Its inevitable and its going to happen to you... eventually.
If you've ever had a hard drive fail you're in good company. Despite all efforts and good practise hard drives do eventually fail. With a few simple steps we can protect ourselves from the fallout of drive failure.
The best measure of protection is prevention and most modern hard drives have
S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) monitoring built in. This technology is designed to continually monitor and warn a user of impending drive failure while there is still time to take action. Given this you would be forgiven for thinking you couldn't do any more to help - but that's wrong!
There are other simple ways you can insure a healthy disk and a longer life for your hard drive. First off we need to abide to some good practise... Often power outage or even mishandling of the drive will cause failure, so we need to insure we shut down or dismount the drive correctly while in use. Also treat your drive with care, if you were to drop it - you should expect problems its not a punch bag nor will it bounce, so try not to bash it about.
Defraggler is published by the team at Piriform, it is simple, clean and easy to use but also offers many advanced features for a better experience. Defraggler is not only designed for de-fragmenting it also offers the ability to check disk for errors. It can be a complete free replacement for the limited built in features that Windows already offers.
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