Caring for Your Hard Disk Drive

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. Support-to-go offers the following tips to protect and care for your hard drive:

1.      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.

2.      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.

3.      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.

4.      Perform periodic checks of your hard disk drive

5.      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.