Good Hard Drive Maintenance Tips

The hard drive is probably the weakest component of a computer, and unfortunately it's also probably the most important. All of your data is stored on the little electronic brain, and you've got to treat it right to get a good, long life out of it. Here are a few tips to increase your hard drive's life and avoid some of the common pitfalls of hard drive ownership.

Defragment your drive regularly. This could conceivably hard drive life. The longer a hard drive is running, the more fragmented files get, causing more physical stress to the internal components as they search back and forth for specific bits of information. Defragmenting the drive moves a file's sectors into more of an orderly structure, decreasing the time taken to seek out bits of a file and in the process helping you get the best possible performance from your drive. Many experts encourage monthly, if not weekly, defragmentation of your drive. Make a schedule to defrag and make sure you follow it; also, the Windows "Disk Cleanup" utility can help free up some drive space, which is always helpful for your hard drive.

Watch heat and vibration, they're two of a hard drive's worst enemies. Many offices don't consider heat to be that dangerous; after all, computers have fans, right? But the fan in a computer tower is designed for the normal heat of operation, not more extreme temperatures possible when a computer is put in a compartment such as a closed desk. Also, keeping a computer near any source of vibration (such as a large copy machine) is a bad idea; the vibrations can throw off the delicate internal mechanisms of a drive. Humidity is also bad news; ideally, your computer should be kept in a clean, open, dry area at a good room temperature.