How to prolong your hard drive and reduce the chances of data loss

While
Dave’s Computers will always be around to recover your data, it would be better
for everyone if you didn’t lose it in the first place. One easy way to do that
is to treat your hard drives the right way. While designed to be reliable and
robust, there are some practical things you can do to extend their working
life.

Hard drives
may be cheap but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to squeeze as much value as
possible from them. If you’re interested in stretching the life of your drive
to the max, follow some of these simple tips.

Reducing the chance of
data loss

Hard
drives, both HDD and SSD have an MTBF, Mean Time Before Failure, or around
100,000 hours. That sounds like a lot but the more you use them, the faster
that time runs out. It isn’t a hard limit but more of a guideline of how long
you can reasonably expect a hard drive to survive for.

To get the
most out of that, try these longevity tips:

• Try
  to not move a desktop computer whenever possible. Sudden moves can damage HDD
  drives irreparably. SSD less so but you still need to be careful.
• Avoid
  overheating. Keep your computer clean, make sure all fans are working and use a
  temperature monitor to ensure nothing gets too hot. Heat is the enemy of
  electronics.
• Avoid
  high intensity applications such as bit torrent. Bit torrent and other seed
  programs utilize a lot of hard drive. It has to work very hard reading and
  writing which can and likely will, degrade its operating life over time.
• Turn
  on TRIM for SSDs. Solid State Drives do not need defragmenting as they have a
  built-in system called TRIM to manage that. If you install an SSD on your computer,
  make sure you never defragment it and that TRIM is enabled.
• Don’t
  defrag HDDs too often. Windows will tell you when you need to defragment your
  hard drive. Listen to it and don’t defrag unnecessarily. It puts a lot of
  pressure on a drive so should be only be performed on a schedule.
• Back
  up your important data now. Backups are only good if you plan in advance. You
  cannot back up a failed drive so you need to be prepared. Back your data up to
  the cloud and to a separate hard drive for maximum safety.

If you do
suffer data loss, Dave’s Computer in New Jersey can help. Our data recovery
team has vast experience in recovering data from dead drives and many other
types of lost data. We would be happy to help!