Ok, so this article might be a bit ‘technical’ for a blog that focusses on sales and marketing, but the subject affects pretty much every PC user, so we think it’s well worth highlighting.

We’re assuming that most of our readers know what a hard drive is (and what it does) but if not, you might want to take a quick look at the Wikipedia definition here.

Hard drives are something that we rarely tend to worry about… until they go wrong that is. If you’ve ever been unlucky enough to suffer from a hard drive failure, then you will know exactly how inconvenient this can be… at best temporarily preventing you from working, and at worst, losing months (or even years) worth of work… not to mention the hours spent trying to recover data, and the enormous cost to your business.

If hard drive failure hasn’t effected you already, there’s a good chance that you know someone who has suffered from it. If you’ve ever wondered why it can happen, it might be worth taking a look at the video below (which shows the inside workings of a hard drive in action).

Scary stuff isn’t it! With extremely delicate parts moving around so quickly, it’s perhaps unsurprising that things can go wrong!

Unfortunately there’s not much you can do to prevent hard drive failure, but there are a number of steps you can take to prepare for it. The expression “prevention is better than cure” is most apt here… and the best prevention is to back up your data regularly (ideally every day, but at least once a week).

It’s also worth ‘keeping an eye out’ for potential trouble, and whilst drives can (and do) fail without warning, there are a few symptoms worth looking out for:-

Computer won’t let you save a document
Frequent computer Crashes
Slow performance
Strange Noises

You can read about these in more detail at Lifehack.org

So if you haven’t done so already, now might be the time to back up your data… we’ll be posting some tips on this in a future article.

Image by a11sus