Failing Hard Drives – 3 Common Causes

By: Will Lambert

Although we trust our hard drives to permanently store documents, music and irreplaceable photographs, ready for us to access at the click of a mouse; it’s a fact of life that eventually the device will fail. In many cases this will lead to the permanent loss of data, and all the heartache this can bring. The disturbing truth is that only around 50% of people make backup copies of their important files on a separate storage device. So what causes a hard drive to fail? Here we look at 3 of the most common reasons.

1. Shock

A hard drive is a delicate piece of precision engineering, the platters rotate at very high speed (typically between 5,400 and 10,000 RPM), and the head which reads and writes the data from the disk floats on a cushion of air a precise distance from the platters. Incredibly, this distance is around 0.5 micro inches (just a few billionths of a meter), compare this to a human hair, which is about 2,000 micro inches thick! Excess shock or repeated vibration is a significant cause of catastrophic drive failure, since it can cause the head to literally ‘crash’ into the platter.

2. Power Fluctuations

Any of the delicate electronics in your computer can be damaged by power surges, and the hard drive is no exception. It’s worth investing in a surge protector to safeguard your system.

3. Excess Heat

Although modern hard drives are built to withstand a reasonable amount of heat, too much can cause them to fail. This is especially true with laptops, since they lack the airflow typically present in a desktop system. Ensuring you don’t block the ventilation holes (and keep them free from dust and fluff), and possibly invest in a laptop cooling device, will help prevent this problem.

Remembering that nothing lasts forever, and your hard drive will fail sooner or later, it’s a good idea to form a backup strategy while you can. External hard disks and pen drives are readily available and getting cheaper all the time, so there’s really no excuse for playing Russian roulette with your valuable data.

About the Author

As well as writing articles online, the author runs a website for sufferers of hip joint pain which offers advice on joint pain relief.

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