Taking Care of Your Hard Disk

Hard Disk Drives Should Be Treated Well

Despite the obvious importance of this equipment to your system, many users neglect to care for their hard disk drive. Your drive is easily susceptible to many sources of damage.

Unexpected system shutdown due to power outage and system freeze due to bad hardware parts, overheated parts, bad installation software, or bad practice in overclocking that makes the system unstable, are just some of the cause of bad sectors in Hard Disk Drives or HDDs. The more frequent the scandisk before booting windows due to unexpected system shutdown is a bad sign that your hard disk is doomed to have corrupt system files & finally to eventually have bad sectors on it.

All newly manufactured disks actually have bad sectors on them!

This is a consequence of the manufacturing technology and tolerances inherent in them. The factory does a low level scan and ‘formats’ it by putting the needed entries inthe BPB to lock out these physical imperfections.

Logically, avoidance of shock is the best way to ensure data integrity. of course, a disk should never be moved when powered on. Careful handling and proper mounting are key. Operationally, airflow and keeping the airhole open (that little dimple amrked ‘do not cover’ on your new hard disk) are all that are really needed. AFAIK, only the WDC raptor 10ks require active cooling, but that is more to prevent thermal build-up inside your case. And of course, register your drive online with the original manufacturer. I have found that WDC and Hitachi go out of heir way to help the end-user even when your local dealer has abandoned you.

Some new hitachi drives have active protection – their electronics can detect if they are falling and automatically lock the heads to prevent data loss. Try to get some of these new drives if you can – they are appearing first in the new deskstar notebook HDDs.

1. Do not bump your hard disk at all. Eventhough, the Hard Disk Drive (HDD) is mostly made of metal, you have to handle it delicately like an egg. Protect your drive from excessive jarring and bumping. All too often, when people install, move or reconfigure hard disk drives, they knock the drive around unintentionally, damaging equipment that can result in the loss of data. Do not let it fall or get bumped by anything. Prevent excessive vibration ;

2. If you don’t want bad sectors, never move your PC while it is on.  Shutdown, Shutoff, then move the PC. Then turn it back on;Place your hardware in a safe location. When you move your computer to a new position (from your desk to the floor, or from a horizontal to a vertical position), you should always backup the hard disk drive. An accidental bump to the drive could cause the heads to track differently, resulting in disk read or write errors;

3. Don’t place your hard drive inside an enclosure which will necessitate the use of cooling fans within the enclosure. Install the HDD properly in a 3.5″ drive bay, place an 80-120mm fan mounted to blow air across the drive to cool it. Use the maximum of 4 screws to make sure there is adequate heat transfer from the drive casing to your PC casing.

4. Only hold or handle your HDDs by their edges, never touch the printed circuit boards or electronic parts;

5. If you have to put the HDD down, lay it down on an anti-static bag. Beware of static. Static electricity, an unseen and unfelt enemy, can wreak havoc on the wiring inside computer chips and transistors. Because it’s so easy to discharge built-up static when you touch a hard disk drive, precautions like wrist straps can help prevent static discharge. Make sure they are in proper packaging (anti-static bags and clamshells or styro boxes) if you have to store them ;

6. When mounting HDDs use the proper screws.  (coarse thread and shorter screw) as opposed to the screws for CDROM drives and Floppy Drives which are fine thread, and the case screws which are coarse thread but longer;

7. Use as many screws to mount your HDD as possible, usually 4. Some techs will use only 3, I have seen HDDs mounted using only 1  screw. Why? the 4 screws will ensure proper heat transfer from the HDD to the case;

8. Tighten but not overtighten the screws. Your screws are steel, the HDD case is aluminum, you are in danger or damaging the thread in your HDD if you overtighten;

9. You may mount the HDD in any way (level, un-level, upwards, downwards, vertical) whatever it takes to make it fit your casing. There will be no problem performance-wise. Do not put your HDDs one on top of one another.

But, mind you, if in the future say 2 years, you have to unmount and reinstall the HDD in a configuration different to what it has been accustomed to, the HDD might die on you just like that. Example ? vertically mounted for 2 years, then i-reinstall mo horizontally. Maaring pag-on mo pa lang ng PC, dedo na ang HDD. It happened to me 3X already. Perfectly working HDD, then remounted in a different attitude, patay. Most probably the bearings have gotten used to the old mounting and seize up when mounted differently.

10. Keep your HDDs cool. Acclimatize the room in which you store your equipment. Be careful of temperature, humidity, altitude and vibration, all forces that could lead to the intermittent or total failure of hard drives.Proper ventilation will prolong the life of the hard disk. Blow fans on them, use coolers. At the very least make sure your casing is properly ventilated. Heat shortens the life of HDDs. Make sure it is always clean and free from dust.

11. Cables? Make sure your cables are good and connected correctly. I have had bad cables kill HDDs one after the other. Lungkot.

12. Power Supply? Make sure your power supply is up to snuff . Meaning, there’s good voltage. This is where most HDDs fail after serving you for a long time. Low 12-volt rails kill HDD motors. Bad 5V kill HDD electronics.

13. Power connectors. Make sure your power connectors (those white plugs with yellow, black and red wires) fit well. Loose connectors provide bad power. After running your PC for a while, say 15-30 minutes, touch your connectors, if they are hot, then there?s something loose, replace with a spare connector and label the bad connector. If you do system checkups, it is good to take note of heat discoloration on power connectors and replace those bad ones;

14. Brown outs do not just kill lights, they kill HDDs. Brown outs are sometimes accompanied by bad power spikes and deadly voltage fluctuations. If you can afford a good UPS, buy one. Don’t press the reset button while the drive is accessing data. UPS + proper grounding.

15. When transferring HDDs between systems don?t just take one and install into another and fire it up just like that. Please make sure you get into BIOS first and make sure that your new system is set to ?auto?. If your old system detected the HDD using manual or non-standard parameters, then duplicate the parameters first in BIOS in the new system before booting up. You might scramble all your data if your new system tries to read the HDD using wrong parameters.

16. If you use your PC a lot, defrag your partitions once a month. If not, a defrag once every 3 months will be fine. For those of you who think that defragmention speeds up your HDDs death, may I give a small explanation. If your partition is quite defragmented, your HDD will be doing a lot of unnecessary work by default, its head going back and forth trying to get to the different parts of your files scattered all over your disk. Besides with a defragmented disk, you will have a more responsive PC.

17. Install enough RAM. Put as much RAM on your computer so that your HDD won’t be trashing too much! If you have small amount of RAM, your OS will be caching on your HD. You don’t want your HDD swapping files back and forth from system RAM and the swap file. Lots of work for the HDD equals a slow PC.

18. Partition your HDD. At least 2 partitions. One partition for your Operating System. The other one for your data. This way if your OS gets corrupted (and it happens) you don?t have to perform PC acrobatics to get your data back. You can reformat your OS partition and be assured that your data is safe in a separate partition.

To check for bad sectors in win9x, use scandisk then check “thorough” in the dialog box. Better yet, restart to “dos”, then at the command prompt, type scandisk (specify the drive letter of the partition) example “scandisk c:” (without the quotation marks of course.

To check for bad sectors in win2k or XP, click start>programs>accesories>command prompt.
At the command prompt type “chkdsk (then type the letter of the partition you want to check”, example “chkdsk d:”. A more thorough way would be (takes longer though) to add the switches “/f” and “/r” which would make the checking more thorough or repair the partition if required. The command would therefore be “chkdsk d: /f /r”

You might get a message “the system cannot unmount the volume” blah-blah ” do you want windows to check the volume the next time you restart?” or some such. Say “yes” or type “Y” then reboot. Your system will thoroughly check the partition when you restart. Take note of what messages come out. It will tell you if it has bad sectors and how much. If it is possible to repair it, then the system will attempt to repair any file system problems.

Bad sectors happens and it will happen. These bad sectors should be the least of your worries! It’s the spindle and motor of your HDD that you have to worry about. The hard disk drive have mechanical/electronic devices that are bound to break down in the long run. The hard disks have turning motors. They all die. I’ve had HDDs that are relatively clean (no bad sectors) but are unusable because something has gone wrong with the mechanicals. Your OS can handle bad sectors but not mechanical troubles.

All we can do is get the most out of our HDDs time. Meanwhile, the best way is to save our data is to always backup. You’ll never know when your HDD will experience a head crash and eventually die on you.

Or better yet, use the new technology in data storage – Soli-State Drives or SSDs !

A solid-state drive (SSD), sometimes called a solid-state disk or electronic disk, is a data storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies asmemory to store data persistently. SSD technology uses electronic interfaces compatible with traditional block I/O hard disk drives. SSDs do not employ any moving mechanical components, which distinguishes them from traditional magnetic disks such as hard disk drives (HDDs) or floppy disk, which are electromechanical devices containing spinning disks and movable read/write heads. Compared to electromechanical disks, SSDs are typically less susceptible to physical shock, are silent, and have lower access time and latency, but are, at present market prices, more expensive per unit of storage.