A lot of clients has been asking me about the lifespan of their hard drive every time they come to my shop to reformat their system and install a new operating system.
I would say typically that a hard drive usually lasts some thousand times of reformat. Well, actually it still depends on the frequency of your usage with your system. I will explain more on this later.
Now, for those who are really wondering about the factors of how a hard drive fails, here are the reasons.
Wear and tear
As I mentioned earlier, a hard drive can fail to depend on the frequency of usage and the heaviness of the task that is being loaded to the hard drive.
Heavy loads include:
- Huge file transfers
- Repeated reformat
- Running heavy resource-demanding games
Of course, those things are inevitable because those are the reasons why you got a computer system in the first place—to do those things.
Time
Time easily runs out. Students usually have their buns in a twist finding the time to write essays, which is why to resort to Essay Twist, to untwist their twisted schedules.
Time is of the essence for you too. Everything wears out and deteriorates over time. That could be said as well with hard drives. Such is inevitable just as any circumstances in this world.
That is why if you can afford it do not buy a second-hand model especially the ones which are manufactured a decade ago. Chances of that drive to live long and still be reliable is way too slim to anticipate.
Heat
Heat is a notorious one for killing hard drives. It is the most common encountered issues among my clients. Some even burn literally, perhaps due to poor ventilation and proper installation.
It is highly advised that you check the connections and make sure that there are no loose cables and all the fans are working.
Another thing is you should keep the inside of your computer CPU clean and free from cobwebs and dust. Just be careful not to touch some of the sensitive parts while you are at it. A CPU blower will do the trick for this job.
Impact
One thing you should know about hard drives is that they have moving parts inside. Therefore you should avoid knocking it intentionally or unintentionally.
There are also instances that a drive gets damaged when you move it while it is spinning or having some heavy tasks at the moment. The disk can spin out of place or an abrupt interruption of the activity can create some bad sectors on the disk itself.
Power failure
Yes, those sudden cut off power on your system, brown-outs or accidental plug-out of electric cable can lead to some damage to your disk. This occurs usually when you are transferring huge files and this incident happens.
To prevent this kind of situation, buy a UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply) to make sure that you will still have power in case of brownouts or other power failure instances. Giving you enough time to save your work and properly shut down your system.
Malware
Chances of this happening are quite slim but still worth noting. Malware can damage your drive when it is programmed to give heavy loads of tasks through the disk. This can cause overheating even with enough ventilation inside your system hardware.
One way to check your system for malware is to open the Task Manager on your desktop and see the applications that are consuming too much resource from the drive. See running applications and if you find some irregularities or an app that should not be there or should not be running in the first place, try stopping it by clicking “end process”.
And if that does not work then you are probably infected and you should run system diagnostic and scan for viruses and malware.
Reprogram your operating system should the antivirus fail and if the anomaly still persists.
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