Taking Care of Your Hard Drive

Taking Care of Your Hard Drive:
The hard drive is a very important part of the computer. The hard drive contains all the data on your laptop or desktop. It is where the operating system, software, pictures, videos, and other files are stored. For some people the data on it is even more valuable than the computer itself.
Under certain circumstances, the hard disk might suddenly fail with no warning at all. This would cause your computer to be unable to boot up with a warning message like “no bootable device found” or Windows continuously freezing even after a full system recovery or operating system reinstallation. The most common cause of this is an internal failure of the electronic components of the hard drive or problem with the magnetic read/write head inside the hard drive.
Despite the fact that serious hard drive problems are usually beyond our control, it is still highly recommended that we practice taking care of the hard drive to decrease the chance of encountering problems. Here are some tips for proper maintenance of your storage devices.
Disk cleanup – Unwanted and temporary files will slowly accumulate on your computer. You should periodically run disk cleanup to remove the clutter on your hard drive. To access this utility follow these steps:
1. Click Start, and point to All Programs.
2. Point to Accessories and then to System Tools.
3. Click Disk Cleanup. Run the utility to delete unwanted files.


Defrag the hard drive – Constant copying/deleting files, uninstalling and reinstalling of software will slowly fragment the data on the hard drive. This means that a single large file might be stored on several different locations on the hard drive. This might cause the computer to take slightly longer time to access that file. To defragment the data on the hard drive follow the steps below.
1. Click Start, and point to All Programs.
2. Point to Accessories and then to System Tools.
3. Click Disk Defragmenter. Run the program. This might take several hours to complete
Taking care of the hard drive is not limited to internal device only. Your data drive or external hard drive is much more important as it stores all important documents from your internal hard drive.
Here are some tips for taking care of your external hard drive:
Safely remove from USB – Always choose to safely remove a USB hard drive before physically disconnecting the USB cable from the computer. Choose this option in Windows before unplugging it. This would prevent accidentally interrupting any write operation on the hard drive which could cause corruption of data or file system.
Protect from physical abuse – Be mindful of your external hard drive when you move it around or when you carry during travelling. Modern hard drives have a level of shock resistance but you should not count on it to save your hard drive from a bad drop.