How to make your hard drive last very long

Hard drive will definitely be ridden with bad sectors and eventually park up but in actual sense, a hard drive is meant to last for at least five to six years if there was no fault on the manufacturer's side and it was handled properly.
Most causes of hard drive failure is due to wrong usage or wrong handling.
Follow the steps bellow to elongate the life of your drive:

1. Keep the drive well ventilated: heat is one of the major causes of hard drive failure. keep the drive well ventilated, blow out dust from PC once in a while to aid air circulation.
   

2. Handle your hard drive with special care: hard drive is very delicate device and care should be excercised while handling them to avoid physical damage which is one of easiest way to render drives unusable.
   

3. Do you off your PC from the on/off button?: Offing your computer or pulling out external drive without properly shutting down the processes running on them increases the chances of writing "dirty" data to the drives and this creates bad sectors on the drive. to avoid this, always proper shutting down of your pc or always ensure the drives were properly ejected from their host computer before unplugging from pc.
   

4. Perform disc defragmentation: disc defragmentation helps reduce the time needed for drive operations. When files are fragmented, they are kept in different locations and when the files are demanded for, hard drive does more work trying locate the file(s). Disc defragmentation ensures this happens less often.
   

5. Perform system scans: when prompted by your PC for disc checks at startup, allow the process to complete. Though this might take time, it is worth your time. Also perform "sfc/scannow" from command prompt admin to fix file system issues.