17 February 2011
The hard drive is the brain, heart and soul of your computer. It is an amazing marvel of computing technology as its storage capacity and cost have dramatically improved through the years. It is unfortunate, however, that its basic weakness still remains. Being mechanical, hard drive are prone to simply reaching an end to their working life, dying out eventually.
The bitter truth is that hard drives, like all things mechanical, just don’t have an eternal lifespan
For instance, the moving parts of the hard drive—spinning disk and read/write heads, can bump together (as when the working computer is jostled) and may cause a fatal head crash. Or the electric motor powering the spinning may soon wear out. Or the air filter just may break down and the minutest of contamination may get into the gap between the read/write head and the spinning platter to cause a major problem. The bitter truth is that hard drives, like all things mechanical, just don’t have an eternal lifespan.
But how do you catch a failing hard drive? What are the signs you should look for in a failing hard drive? For the sake of your precious data, remember the following:
- Computer freezes, mouse cursor is unmovable and keystrokes are ignored
- Frequent, though irregular crashes of your OS, most especially while booting up Windows
- Frequent and cryptic error messages, especially while doing simple tasks like creating, moving, copying and deleting files
- Sudden scrambling and changing of folder and file names
- Mysterious disappearing of files and folders
- Exceptionally long time to access folders and files
- Hard disk goes silent for a long period after opening a file or folder
- Garbled output from open files and prints
- Hard drive emits sounds like clicks, beeps and grinds
When you notice any of these warning signs of a failing hard drive, backing up your data should be your top priority. In many cases where the hard drive just reached its maximum lifespan, there really is nothing you can do to keep it alive longer. The only thing to do is to back up the data it contains and bid your hard drive goodbye.
If, however, your hard drive fails before you have managed to perform a successful data back up, the services of a professional data recovery company (such as Kingdom Data Recovery) can help retrieve your lost files.
