Hard Drive Care Questions

I've been a desktop user, and it's well-known that the hard drive is the one thing that will screw up on notebooks, so I just had some basic hard drive care questions.

1. What do you consider a dangerous temperature (celsius) for your hard drives to reach?

2. How do you go about with keeping your hard drives on and off? I have my computer on most of the day, so I'm wondering whether to have the HDDs turn off after a few minutes of inactivity, or keep them on. I can see how both would result in basic wear and tear of the hard drive.

And any other basic notebook/HDD tips would be welcomed. I appreciate it in advance.

 

Hey Rua,

I'd think 40+ degrees Celsius is unhealthy for a hard drive. So if you can't put your hand on it, its running a bit hot.

You know the subject about how to keep a hard drive healthy has been on my mind for quite a while. There are different schools of thoughts on this.

Some think that keeping the hard drive at a consistent temperate (i.e. either off all the time or on all the time) is the best way to ensure longevity.

Others see it from a "wear and tear" point of view. As long as you're not using it, turn it off.

Personally, I only turn the hard drive off if I'm not going to use it for say, the rest of the night. What I also recommend, particularly for laptop hard drive's, is to avoid lots of pressure in terms of data transfers. If you're going to copy a DVD to your hard drive, and then encode, recode and move it, that's a lot of transferred files.

Generally, life expectancy is measured in the numer read and write counts. Usually, this is a number that's quite good and will last you for a while. But if you really work you're hard drive, it'll obviously shorten it's life span quite a bit.

Also, make sure you defragment on a regular basis, keeps the hard drive from doing unnecessary extra work while keeping the computer running quick and smooth.

Lastly, don't drop it, but I think that's a given

Cheers,

 

You should always back up your important files & info. Since you're concern about your internal HD, though rare for it to burn itself out, you might consider external HDs as a work around. And I do recall there's a way to turn your HD to idle even when you're working on the notebook

 

Well I used the Power manager provided by Windows XP to turn off my hard drives after 20 minutes of inactivity, with or without battery. And I have a 200gig external, so file-backup is not a problem. I'd just rather avoid hard drive troubles if I could.