subject: Check Your Hard Drive---(A stitch in time saves nine.) [print this page] Check Your Hard Drive---(A stitch in time saves nine.)
Is your hard drive behaving peculiarly? Have you noticed some freakishness in its behavior? Your hard drive might be having some problems. A groaning noise could be good enough indication for a faulty hard drive. And you can get prepared for the worst, even a hard drive crash, if not attended immediately. However, you can save your vital data and ward off any trouble by acting timely. Get some computer help to learn more about it. Let's discuss in brief what a hard drive has inside.
What's Inside?
It has moving platters or discs with a read/write head only fraction of an inch above it. The platters revolve in overwhelming speed of 7,200 or even a greater speed of 10,000 revolutions per minute in an air tight chamber. If there is a hard disk problem in the mechanical adjustment of the internal parts of the hard drive, it can make peculiar noises.
What to Do?
The first thing to do is to take a back up of the vital data that you might have on to a separate media like a DVD or an external hard drive. That is what I mean by a stitch in time or else you will end up wasting a lot of time calling a technician and recovering the lost data and that also wouldn't let you recover one hundred percent of the data you stored. The question is whether we can get an idea of the upcoming hard drive crash in advance?
Generally the hard drive manufacturers include the SMART (Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) utility with their product. At the same time there are other utilities as well, which can be downloaded from the hard-drive manufacturers' website and run it to check the health of your hard drive. If you are apprehensive of a hard-drive crash then make sure to backup all your data in a different media and discuss the matter with a technician who would check the health of your hard-drive and advise accordingly.
