Why Do Hard Drives Fail?

It is very easy to forget how long we can all spend working on an important university or business document or PowerPoint presentation, if you were to add it all up it could amount to days and on occasions weeks but what do you do when you suddenly find the file has simply vanished from your computer.

You check your deleted files with no luck and do a full search on your computer but the file or folder has simply vanished. In all probability the file is still on your hard disk but for some reason cannot be found which may be the first signs of a degraded drive.

Much as we would like to believe a hard drive will not last forever but has a definitive life expectancy which is often referred to as a mean time between failures (MTB). MTB can often be used as a reference to a drive future reliability and calculations would put expected drive failures at less than 0.1 percent.

Unfortunately life isn’t always that straight forward!

So the big question is when is the best time to renew my hard drive so it does not suffer from any failures?

This is one of those wide open questions that will have experts arguing until the cows come home because there are a wide variety of factors that come into play.

The first major aspect is of course the use that a computer is put through during its lifespan. Many home users only use their Pc very occasionally and store relatively small numbers of files or photos. In this scenario it would be nice to expect a drive to last over 5 years (don’t assume this though).

The same expectation could be applied to the many mid range computer users which includes office Pc’s laptops and home desktop systems, where users have a small number of programs in use and small amounts of data or if data is stored on a central server.

But for power users it is an entirely different story. Extreme gamers and users of high end commercial applications will be driving their systems very hard indeed and the amount of data that is shifted into swap files or written back to the disk is huge so its only reasonable to expect disk life to be shorter and the chances of drive failure or disk degradation to be far higher.

To combat the increased risk of failure and to protect essential data well informed IT departments will make sure that the machines are renewed far more often than office PC’s in this scenario. Another consideration for this is also business productivity for example shorter design time or time to market.

For business critical applications extended use sees a ramp up of hard disk degradation and also an increase in mechanical drive failures.

During challenging economic times, business computer refresh programs are often put of to protect working capital which on the face of it can be seen as a sound business decision but there can be a large bite to this policy if an essential drive or server fails with a resultant loss of business critical data.

Any business should in this day and age have effective remote server backup and disaster recovery policies in place especially if postponing a business system upgrade.

Another prime factor affecting the longevity of the drive is of course disk maintenance. If your hard drive is allowed to become fragmented then it will have to work an awful lot harder to pick up information and in extreme cases of hard disk fragmentation drives can get very stressed to the point of failure.

Your lost file should be easily recoverable but you do need to bear in mind that any further information written to your hard drive can over write the file you are trying to save. This often happens with data recovery software so if diy recovery is your choice be warned.

Most data recovery experts will be able to restore your deleted or lost files even if your drive has degraded and even if your drive has bad sectors that are unreadable hard drive recovery and file recovery are often very successful.