Care of Hard Disks

Other Removable Magnetic Media

Several other kinds of removable magnetic media are in use, such as the Zip disk. All of these have a much higher capacity than floppy disks.

Each type of media requires its own drive. The drives and disks are much more expensive than floppy drives and disks, but then, you are getting much larger capacities.

There are other kinds of storage devices that are not magnetic, such as flash drives and optical discs (CD and DVD) or that are not disks, such as magnetic tape. These will be discussed later.

To keep your hard disk happy and healthy you must observe a few precautions. Each medium has its own particular weaknesses and hazards to avoid. Be careful or suffer the consequences - lost data, which means, at best, lots of lost time and effort!

Don't

Jar the computer while the disk is spinning.

Turn the computer off and quickly back on before spinning has stopped.

Drop it - ever.

Credit: Western Digital

Hard disks are protected by being sealed in air-tight cases. But when damage does occur, it is a more serious matter that with removable media. Larger amounts of data can be lost and hard disks are much, much more expensive that removable disks.

Hard disks can have problems from magnetic fields and heat, but these are rare.

Most problems occur when the read/write head (looks like a pointer in the photo) damages the metal disk by hitting or even just touching it. This is called a head crash.

When the computer is on, the hard disk is spinning extremely fast. Any contact at all can cause pits or scratches. Every scratch or pit is lost data. Damage in the root directory turns the whole hard disk into a lovely doorstop! It's completely dead.

So the goal here is to keep that read/write head where it belongs, just barely above the hard disk, but never, ever touching it.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23