how to prolong Hard drive life?

[DK2]

Some reading for ya;
http://www.a-datarecovery.com/articlepc.html
http://www.tomcoughlin.com/Techpaper...,%20090806.pdf

defrag your drive once and while, it keeps all the file fragments together,
so the drive's arms don't have to work so hard.

[Oversized Rooster]

I regularly defrag all my drives. I keep them cool between 20 and 30 degrees. Beyond this I don't really "care" about them because I backup my important things in between 3 and 4 other places (on other HDs within the same machine, and also across the network).

As soon as a drive is within 6 months of the warranty end period, I sell it.

[Eldonko]

I think my HDs are the only thing that have never died on me out of all components. I dont defrag, I format constantly and have 0 cooling on them. Maybe Im lucky, I dunno but I have everything backed up anyway so am not worried about it.

[DarKStar]

Originally Posted by MelodyofOblivion

hi there, i have a 1 tb HDD and i am really scare if that drive fails and lose my data, does anyone know a good way to prolong the life of a hard drive, will leaving it on 24hours help? always put my PC to self standby.

thanks

I always buy my hard drives in pair - like memory Drives are cheap so buy them in pair and use the free acronis tool from seagate's website to make a 1:1 clone and keep it aside - and keep your backups up to date from time to time - takes only a few minutes with those drives. How to prolong the life of a HDD ? Well there is no garantee - companies are cutting corners now and a lot of people are having bad luck with hard drives failing early lately, so always be on your guard - You want to make sure your drive is level and has good airflow around it and running as cool as possible - running drives too hot over long periods of time can reduce its life or even cause them to fail - eventhough their specs say 60C - Remember the magic number, 50C, keep it below 50C. Also, use a good quality power supply - Most of the repetitive failures I've seen around me were caused by faulty or bad power supplies - drives are very sensitive to power issues.

Now, about the turning on and off a drive - I wouldn't worry about that - if you look way back at the very first generation of hard drives that was an issue, but now hard drives can easily withstand thousands of on/off cycles - of course you are not going to turn it on/off 100 times every day, but when you don't use your PC for extended period of times - keeping in mind that when you turn on your PC there is that period of startup stress on components, but if done reasonably I wouldn't worry - I personally leave my system on 24/7 - since I use my PC for work too and on a regular basis and there is absolutely no problem in leaving your system on at all times - will it increase the life of your HDD ? well it depends. A healthy HD that has no problem can withstand thousands of on/off cycles - however, and you cannot know this in advance, a drive that has a known defect, can cause it to fail - so in order to sleep well at night, just buy pairs, make a backup and leave it on ! :)