Drive Failures

For those of you that don't believe in backing up your documents, photos or music, and you are the majority, here is something to think about. I have been seeing an increasing number of hard drive failures over the past few months. Sometimes I am contacted early in the failure cycle but sometimes its just too late. Catastrophic failure of the hard drive means you lose everything. Basically your computer will not start (boot) and in many case the BIOS(the Basic Input Output System) will not even recognize that your computer even has a hard drive. As Monty Python would say you have a "Dead Computer". (see Dead Parrot sketch)

What this means is that all those digital family pictures you have downloaded to your computer are gone. Your financial records from Money, Quicken or your favorite tax program are lost forever, not to mention your address book in Outlook, calender and all those emails you wanted to keep. Gone, gone, gone.. Favorite web sites, music, family trees, and medical records, all gone. Sure there are companies out there that will dismantle a damaged drive and recover any data that still exists but these services run into the $1000s and there are NO guarantees.

So what can you do:

1. Install an automatic backup system, today.
   
2. Pay attention to changes in your computers performance, if it is taking extra time to respond to data opened from your hard drive this could be an indicator of a hard drive failure.
   
3. Ensure your hard drive is monitored by the S.M.A.R.T. system giving you an early warning of pending failure.
4. Have your computer serviced regularly by a qualified technician.
5. Consider replacing your hard drive after 2 to 3 years

Of late I have seen many Maxtor hard drive failures. Now to be fair they are an inexpensive brand and consequently used in high numbers. However, Western Digital drives fall into this same criteria but I feel are not failing as frequently. If you have a Maxtor drive in your PC, and it is more than 2 years old, and you don't have an automatic backup system, I would highly recommend you change it. Fix My PC 2 will change your hard drive over to a Seagate or Western Digital, 160 GByte Drive for $129. Look at your BIOS or Windows Device Manager to determine what drive you have.

So you have been warned.. but let's hope you you don't experience a drive failure, and if you do that you have everything backed up.

Until then Ctrl-Alt-Del

Steve Holder