What you need to know about hard drive failure

Every day, hundreds of thousands of computer hard drives will catastrophically fail, rendering your data dead and buried. Much like an automobile, computers are boxes made up of parts, some moving, some solid-state (not moving). These moving parts have a limited lifespan and will eventually seize up and completely fail, usually without notice. Let's take some time to go over the basics of the hard drive to explain why this fact is not usually known (or thought of) by the average computer user.

First, the hard drive technology that you use today in your desktop or laptop is basically the same premise as it was in the late 50's and early 60's when the large computer corporations began to invent and use them for data storage. The general premise of the hard drive is the primary storage device of your computer, which spins at high speed, reads and writes one or many fixed disk platters magnetically. Today's hard drives will usually spin at rotation speeds of 5400 to 7200RPM, and there are specialty drives that can be purchased that spin even higher than that. Now think for a moment if you personally had to turn a lever clockwise 5,000 times every minute, for three or more years. Wouldn't you get tired at some point? Unfortunately, hard drives have to pull this duty and they do get tired, as would you! Let's add some other variables into the mix of what a hard drive has to deal with on a daily basis. Heat is a general factor of computing and can severely erode the delicate components inside a hard drive. Every one of today's computer systems generate high amount of heat, which the computer tries to diffuse with fans and other cooling systems, often to mixed results. Secondly, portability is also an enemy to today's tiny hard drives that you find in laptop computers. Bumping and dropping equipment due to the portability often will cause the tiny hard drive parts to become jammed or misaligned, causing a drive failure. Lastly, but not as common, are spills on the hard drive mechanism. The hard drive is pretty closed off in it's small metal box, but, liquid can sometimes find its way into it and render it useless.

A lot of the earlier computer users will often remember hard drives lasting 10 or more years on systems from the early days of computing. Unfortunately for today's computer users this was pretty true; hard drives lasted a lot longer in the early days due to less platters to read from, larger hard drive components and the fact that those early drives were not as mass-produced as today's ultra-high speed and complex devices. Welcome to the world of disposable consumer electronics, computer users. Today's hard drives typically last from two to three years on average, with some drives failing even faster due to misuse or neglect. With the sizes of hard drives increasing and the footprint of today's computers getting smaller, expect that number to drop even more as the years go on. Another thing to remember is the computer manufacturers such as Apple, Dell and HP do not physically make these hard drives. Vendors such as Maxtor, Western Digital, Toshiba and a few others typically make all of these hard drives for the large computer vendors. Keep that in mind when you are about to unload some ammo on your computer manufacturer for your failed hard drive!

Is there any good news or silver lining to this hard drive epidemic? Yes, there is!

First of all, let's start with the obvious. Backing up your data is the number one defense against a failing hard drive that you have to get into the habit of doing. Hard drives will fail and they are not rebuilt, but simply replaced. If you store years of important data on the drive and it fails, it is officially gone at that point (sort of, we will talk about that in the last few paragraphs). So, the easiest way to proceed during a hard drive failure is to have the drive replaced and resort to your backed up data which would be stored on another completely separate hard drive away from your main computer. There are thousands of programs on the market to do the dirty work of backing up your data and even more external hard drives you can purchase to back that data up to that any computer technician or sales person can tell you about. Apple's new Leopard operating system (for the Macintosh) can automatically backup your data every hour without even thinking about it; you simply purchase an external hard drive and the OS takes care of the rest. The feature is called "Time Machine" and allows you to go back and pull out documents from months ago that you may need with a cool user interface that even a child can understand. Don't forget that external hard drives can fail as well, so, make sure you don't buy a hard drive just to move everything off your internal hard drive "to save space." This is called putting your eggs in one basket and you will lose, trust me. You should have data in more than two places at all times. Typically these backup solutions and concepts will only cost you not even a few hundred dollars and are worth the piece of mind of not having to recreate those business forecast reports that you spent years building in Microsoft Excel...

Secondly, let's talk about working more online. Services such as the wonderful Google allow you to do a lot of the mundane work of Microsoft Office and Excel right on their website, across the internet. You simply create a free Google account and you can completely work on any Microsoft Office document right on the Google servers. They are stored there securely, accessible on any Macintosh or PC with Internet access and can be saved, shared, and worked on 24 hours a day (as long as you have an internet connection). This in essence is a backup, since it's not being stored on your computer as you work on it. You can even save those documents back to your computer if you have to work on them in an airplane or on the train; simply upload them back to Google when you arrive back to the office and they are safe! Apple also offers the $99 a year service called ".Mac" which allows you to also store your documents on a special server away from your main computer. Another good way to get those important files off the internal hard drive. Photo-sharing sites such as Flickr allow you to store your photos online away from your computer as well. Off-site solutions to backup include flash drives, iPods and iPhones, and DVD-RW's are also ways to backup your data; Consider a fireproof box in case your house goes up in flames. If possible, give a friend or a family member living elsewhere a DVD of important data just in case of a natural disaster.

On a side note, most of today's hard drives have something called S.M.A.R.T. built into them which aims to predict an impending failure. This stands for self-monitoring, analysis and reporting technology and sometimes will alert you to the drive failing. I have found that this is a crapshoot and you cannot rely on this technology on a daily basis. Backing up your data is 100% more reliable and you wouldn't want to wait until this reporting technology has decided your drive is dying since it's usually too late by then.

Should you lose a hard drive with all of your data and were not backing up (shame on you!) then there are a few last-ditch efforts to get that data back. Some people swear by removing the clicking hard drive out of the computer and placing it in the refrigerator for awhile (in a static bag, of course). This seems to somehow bring otherwise dead drives back for a few minutes to retrieve that one important thesis you were working on for the last year. If you don't feel comfortable putting your hard drive in with the milk and eggs, you can send the broken drive to the wonderful DriveSavers folks (http://www.drivesavers.com) for data recovery. Before you decide to send them the drive, make sure you run down the bank and apply for a small loan first; typical drive recovery at these folks will usually set you back $800 to $1,500 for that service. They do boast a recovery rate in the high 90% range, but, they will take away over 90% of this week's salary to do the work. Some of the off-the-shelf software usually will only help you if the drive has been erased; once the head crashes or the read-arm fails, this is a hardware failure and software cannot help you.

Lastly, let me make a prediction that everyone can clearly see at this point: there will not be hard drives in computers in about 10 years. Given the proliferation of flash memory such as what is found in the iPhone, iPod and other small MP3 players, there will not be a need for hard drives in the future. Flash-based storage will hopefully drop in cost enough to match the sizes of todays hard drive systems and will appear in everything including desktop machines. Obviously, if it's not flash storage it will be some other technology that we aren't aware of yet (holographics anyone?). Even Apple has released the Macbook Air with a very expensive flash-only solution which means it's a laptop computer with no moving parts at all.

So, in closing, everyone who reads this article must back up your sensitive data in one of the ways listed above and do everyone else a favor and teach them how to backup the data on their machines. Hard drives can be replaced in minutes, but, family photos from the last 10 years usually don't fare so well as far as recovery. Today's computer users just don't understand how valuable their data is and how much it stings when you lose it in the blink of an eye.