Another Day With My PC

Great advances have been made or achieved in hard drive design and architecture over the past 10 years. In case you haven’t noticed, hard disks are one of the few PC peripherals which you can immediately use without having to go through its manual. Of course, installing it can be quite tricky, but everything’s definitely smooth sailing after that.

As with any other PC component, hard drives will eventually reach that point when it won’t be able to retrieve or save data as efficiently as it used to be. This is especially true for data storage devise that are used in laptops. Laptop hard drives are more susceptible to damage or wear and tear because they are constantly being exposed to stress, such as shocks and jolts.

The Old Fashion Way

So how could you prolong the life of your hard drive? If you’re going to ask your parents or grandparents about this, chances are is that they’ll just give you a shrug. For old timers who know a thing or two about PCs, they might suggest methods or procedures which would seem logically sound, but is actually unnecessary and outdated already.

Take for example the common practice of leaving the computers on so as to protect the hard drive. Sounds absurd, huh? I mean, how could letting your hard drive spin needlessly for long number of hours be actually beneficial for your primary storage device?

Believe it or not, this was a sound and even necessary practice in order to stretch the mileage of the component. Subjecting the hard disk to frequent starts and stops back then actually meant exposing it to unnecessary and damaging stress. Hence, many were constrained to leave their computers on for long periods in order to prolong the lifespan of their disks.

It’s Safe to Turn It Off

This wasteful practice of having to leave your hard drive spinning even if you’re not using it is already a thing of the past. Hard drive manufacturers, such as Seagate and Samsung, already guarantee that their products would last around 5 years of more, regardless of whether you leave it spinning constantly or turn it on and off occasionally.

While storage makers can guarantee that constant shut downs would not affect the longevity of their products, other factors can definitely affect its mileage and performance. Heat is a problem that affects every computer component, especially hard disks. The longer your computer is turned or kept on, the greater the heat that it produces. Hence, it is definitely unwise to needlessly keep your computer on, especially when you’re not using it. Not only is this practice wasteful, but it is also damaging to your unit as well.

At Your Every Beck and Call

At a time when everything needs to be done at a heartbeat, it’s not surprising when users would opt to just leave their computers on so that they could immediately use it. Boot up time has tremendously improved over the past several years. However, one would still waste around 3-5 minutes on the start up stage alone. If you don’t want to be wasteful but would want your computer to be immediately available at just a second’s notice, then you might probably opt to just set your PC in standby mode whenever you’re not using it. You would still be wasting electricity on this mode, but the consumption is greatly reduced since power is cut to almost every computer component except the RAM.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2007 at 1:15 am and is filed under General . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.