It often seems as if the computer issues my customers come up with occur in clusters. A month or so ago, I had two customers hit by lightening. Here in Indiana, thats not all that uncommon, especially in spring.
Lately, though, Ive had a lot of calls about various problems with hard drives, so I thought Id write a little bit about hard drive technology and some of the hard facts of hard drives.
WARNING: Im going to explain hard drives for the novice, not for techies, so if youre a purist, stop reading here!
To understand a hard drive, think of a record player. Inside the metal case of a hard drive, you have a metal disk (thats the record) and a mechanical arm with a reading device called a head (thats the needle and needle arm). Your information is written onto the metal disk and then read back to you using the arm/head. Again, this is a vast oversimplification, but the principles are basically the same.
My generation grew up with record players and turntables and will instantly understand the problems with hard drives: 1) they are mechanical and 2) that head needs to access the disk in precise and controlled positioning.
Staying with the record player analogy, remember what happened when you left your favorite 78 of Beach Blanket Bingo laying in the sun? Or what happened when your kid brother came in and started horsing around while you had your portable record player balanced on the arm of your chair? Remember how the diamond needles wore down or were broken when the arm dropped and bounced around, banging the needle on some part of the player?
All of those problems can be recreated on hard drives. Drop the hard drive or the computer where it lives and you will damage the head or the disk or the mechanical arm or all three.
Most desktop computers come home from the store, are placed on the floor or the desk, set up and never or seldom moved again in their life. Laptops, however, are increasing in popularity and because of their very nature (they are portable computers, after all) are moved around often. The potential for disaster is ongoing.
Hard drive technology has improved to match the growing use of laptops. There is a device on many computers called a sudden acceleration sensor which literally senses when the computer is … well, suddenly accelerating, as in falling. This sensor triggers parking of the heads in a safe place and not in contact with the disk, which will hopefully avoid the results when sudden acceleration suddenly ceases, a condition known as landing.
This is a great feature, but in my experience (and the experience of one of my customers) does not protect a hard drive in a laptop that is deliberately slammed against a dresser. It also has not protected another customer laptop from a 3 foot fall to the floor.
Calls from customers who tell me they only want the photos of their kids off the hard drives that are dead as a brick make me sick to my stomach, but when your hard drive fails, its usually too late to remember what precious data you have on them.
This is so boring for me to say, and I know you wont listen, but here we go anyway: if you have photos of your kids, poems your grandma wrote, email from your late Uncle Joe, make sure they are stored in more than one place. Dont trust the hard drive in your 5 year old computer to always be available to you. It wont.