Hard Drive Problems
One of the worst things that can happen to a computer owner is to experience problems with your hard drive. If you experience even a minor problem you should not ignore it, but investgate it asap. Some problems can be fixed fairly easily early on (even with Apple’s Disk Utility for example) but like a tooth ache which is ignored, some minor problems can turn into a big problems later on.
A computer hard drive is a mechanical device. Inside it are platters of magnetic media (see image). These platters are spinning at 5400-7200 r.p.m.’s. Over a lifetime, thats millions of revolutions. A head moves over the platter to read and write data. Eventually this mechanical system will start to wear out. The hard drives will begin to fail eventually: On average a drive’s useful life-span is said to be approximately 5-8 years.
This is a fact you should always have in the back of your mind: ALL DRIVES FAIL AT SOME POINT! This is why it’s so important that you make sure you have a backup solution in place for your computer.
I’m frankly pretty amazed at how many of my clients simply don’t have any backup for their computer. If you own a computer, you need a backup solution.
The best and easiest solution is simply to make sure you have an external backup drive. An external USB Hard Drive’s cost is as low as about $50-60 now for about a 500GB drive. Thats nothing to know your stuff is safe, using Time Machine (on the Mac). You can also get a USB Flash Drive, say a 16GB one for only $10-15 and save your important data and files to it too (this should not be your sole method of backup method though, this is an additional layer of backup). You can even email important documents to yourself (A Gmail account or Google Drive, or Dropbox is also good for this. Its never ceases to amaze me how many clients I’ve met have never backed up even a single file. That is an accident waiting to happen.
If you do have a serious hard drive problem such as clicking sounds, you should generally seek a professional, such as yours truly, immediately. Generally the more you try to boot the computer, the more it will “stress” the hard drive and this additional stress can decrease the potential success of performing data recovery.
How to prevent problems? On Mac, running Disk Repair on a regular basis can help repair minor errors. And again, having a backup drive is CRITICAL for every computer owner. I can not stress this enough.
If have do a hard drive problem, get in touch. I have done a good deal of data recovery experience and sometimes have been able to “work miracles” recovering a client’s precious data: whether thats Music, Photos, Documents, or whatever. This is generally when the client got the drive to me early enough in the game. Sometimes when they kept trying to boot up their computer over and over when it wouldnt start properly, they’ve already stressed the hard drive to its breaking point, basically “killing” the drive and made it impossible to easily recover data with normal drive recovery means. If thats the case, I might have to inform the client I can’t do anythin, and the only hope is to send the drive out to a special company, such as Drive Savers in California, that does High Level Data Recovery (“Level 100” clean room, etc) These are very pricey jobs, and this type of data recovery operation is incredibly expensive; costs start at over a $1000 and can cost 2x-3x that (or more – I had a client once who paid $5,000 – the data was that important to him).
So you DO NOT want to be in that position! MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP. If you don’t and need data recovery services, get in touch.
