Defragmentation, SMART monitoring, and more tips to keep your hard drives chugging along
In an age of increasingly affordable flash storage, hard drives are slowly disappearing from enthusiast rigs and mass-market laptops alike. Although SSDs are markedly faster than their platter-based counterparts, hard drives are still useful for long-term storage, archival, and massive media libraries that don’t require fast read/write speeds. Keeping your hard drives spinning can mean the difference between enjoying a music collection and having a pricey paperweight. Fortunately, it's not all that hard to maintain HDDs since they're a lot like all your other computer components.
Avoid Drops, Kicks, and Other Physical Damage
Unlike other components, hard drives are particularly susceptible to mechanical damage. Hard drives are manufactured with minimal tolerances that make them especially vulnerable to damage during operation. The spinning disks arranged inside each hard drive can usually tolerate slight movements, but aren’t meant to withstand being dropped or shaken—especially not during read/write. Physical damage is the death knell of most drives because a misaligned or otherwise obstructed platter simply can’t spin correctly.
Keep Things Cool
It’s generally a good idea to keep things from getting too toasty inside your PC. Hard drives are designed to operate within a specific range of temperatures. The numbers vary between specific drives, but most hard drives can function normally anywhere from 5 to 60°C (~40-140°F). Drives aren’t especially sensitive to temperature changes, but it’s still a good idea to prevent unnecessary wear and tear whenever possible.
Provide Constant, Stable Power
Hard drives are fickle beasts and require a constant, uninterrupted power source. Brown outs, black outs, and even static discharges can cause permanent data loss. An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) can be a godsend, but they’re probably not feasible for most people. Instead, make sure you keep your computer on a surge protector and avoid turning your PC off and on unnecessarily.
Whenever you’re digging around your PC's internals, make sure to ground yourself before handling your hard drives—or any other components for that matter. Static discharges are particularly dangerous in dry climates, but can happen anytime, anywhere.
Defragment, Defragment, Defragment
Due to the nature of hard drives, data is stored across a physical disk and thus fragments of individual files are written to various physical areas. Over time, these separate fragments can lead to diminished read/write performance. Regular defragmentation—but only when the disk in question is actually fragmented—is an important step in ensuring that your hard drives aren’t working overtime for everyday tasks.
Monitor S.M.A.R.T. Data
Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology can be used to monitor the status of your hard disk drives. SMART provides information on various drive-related statistics like Read Error Rate, Spin-Up Time, Start/Stop Count, and how long the drive has been powered on. There's plenty of free drive monitoring software, such as Acronis Drive Monitor. Keeping tabs on hard drive errors, warnings, and critical events can provide insight into the impending death of a drive or its day-to-day operability.
Switch to an SSD
If you’re especially worried about HDD failure, consider switching over to high-capacity SSDs. Prices are dropping and flash memory is less prone to catastrophic failure because of the absence of moving parts. A set of chips on a PCB are a lot less fragile than spinning disks.
Back up Important Files
This last tip isn’t related to maintaining your drives, but it’s probably even more important. Your data is arguably the most important piece of your computing experience. Essential documents and media are worth more than the initial cost of a drive. All components fail, so it’s important to keep any files that you need backed up.
Have any tips or tricks that you’ve used in the past to maintain your drives? Share them in the comments below!
From maximumpc
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