The human race was always on the look out for ways to store, manage and update information, at the cheapest possible rate and with least space and manpower involved. There are so many types of filing systems, plastic and hard board office stationery, and other means of managing data on paper. When computers first came along, thanks to their size, cost and complexity, almost no one could afford them. Then came the desktop and the home pc – and the world was changed forever. To the home user, the computer has become an integral part of every day life, even if one knows little about how the machine works. There is a general misconception that hard disks last forever. We can keep loading all we want to as long as an anti-virus software is installed and we scan the machine every now and then. Updating the software is still not on the priority list, and users seem more or less blank about all other causes of hard disk failure whenever a company has undertaken a survey. The fact of the day is that the Joe Public of the UK believe that hard disks are as infallible as some divine weapon, and rely on this non-existent property for the preservation of their most precious data. Causes of Hard Disk Failure Hard disks crash due to mainly two reasons – logical and physical. Let us quickly run through how things go wrong in either case below. Logical Causes
- Virus Attack: This is by far the most well-known causes of hard disk crash, though it is not the most common reason why crashes happen. A virus is a programme that is written with the purpose of deleting or corrupting other files. The virus, once it gets in, replicates itself over and over again till it fills the disk and starts to delete application files from it. There are some viruses which first attack a certain format, for example jpeg, and corrupt all files of the same format. This, in turn, affects other applications, and ultimately the computer comes to a standstill internally. Viruses are fascinating as a study matter, and would entail a whole separate article even for a brief introduction. There are viruses that come in through the internet, some that used to affect floppies, some that attack the OS, some that specialise in movie files, and some that come in as ‘innocent’ email attachments.
- OS Crash: The operating system itself might crash. Though all companies claim to be infallible, they are not so. The Operating System will take with it all documents that you may have stashed away in it, like your off-line inbox, your setting records, details and addresses of sites visited etc. All users are strongly advised to keep a backup of any important data in another drive apart from the one in which the OS programme files are kept.
- Fragmentation, Overwriting, and Corruption of Files: There are some folders, such as our mail inboxes, that we keep updating on and off-line. There are many file name ends that trail on and on, and files that have been updated so many times, that they have become half corrupt. As these bad sectors increase in number, the files get more and more fragmented, i.e., they are stored in smaller and smaller pieces that are scattered all over the place.
Physical Causes
- Fire, Water, Dust, Impact: The hard disk does not survive calamities. Though the modern disks are much more hardy than ever before, there is a temperature above which the metal will simply melt. However, humans like to strive for making miracles possible, and data has been recovered by shipwrecked and fried disks too. Dust is a killer for the disk – avoid taking it out by all means; if you do, you will dig the grave for your own data. Impacts can lift data off the disk if the vertical component of the fall is higher than the rate at which the disk rotates, i.e. the data literally flies off the falling computer. Any scratch on the surface of the disk will, again, be a killer for the data.
The final warning for those who still believe in the impenetrable nature of hard disks – no company gives guarantees for more than three to five years for their hard disk – not even the costliest.
Source: http://www.ArticlePros.com/author.php?James Walsh
|
