C-C-Click Click, and Other Symptoms of Hard Drive Failure
Your mind is racing at a mile a minute, and you keep a to-do list for all of the things you are supposed to do. Unfortunately, that to-do list is often forgotten about. You save it as a .DOC text file on your computer, which has been making a strange clicking noise lately. But one day, the clicking sound gets worse, and worse, and worse, until your computer stops working completely. Just like that, all of your data is gone, and that's when it hits you.
The computer's strange clicking noise was the first thing to look at on that to-do list. So, now you have no idea what needs to be done, and have no computer. All of this could have been taken care of with regular maintenance. The hard disk drive of a computer is not a sturdy thing. It contains disks called platters that have data written on them, and they spin at thousands of revolutions per minute. These tiny moving parts read the data off the spinning disks, so it's no wonder that something so intricate degrades with time and use.
It's hard to know when your hard drive is about to die out on you. Every kind of hard drive goes through different amounts of use. Generally, you want to replace your hard drive at least every five years before you experience a devastating crash and lose all of your data. This is a vague figure, though - as is the case with anything, expect the unexpected, because a hard drive can crash within the first year of its life, or survive for more than ten years.
Proper maintenance is key to extending the lifespan of your computer. This entails checking and repairing sectors, running disk defragmentation, keeping the interior of the PC dust-free, and much more. PACE Technical Services can provide you with a computer maintenance to-do list that will prolong the life of your PC. It's simply a waste of money to not take care of something expensive after you buy it. Think about PC maintenance like buying a brand new car and welding the hood shut. It works fine for a few months after you buy it, but it will start to show subtle signs of problems as time goes on.
This is when we meet the famous Edward Aloysius Murphy, Jr, and he slaps you in the face with Murphy's law. This states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, so basically, your car will break down when you need it the most, such as when you're rushing your pregnant family member to the hospital. When the tow truck arrives, you'll have to find a way to explain to him why you welded the hood shut and have performed no maintenance whatsoever on your car without looking like a fool. Good luck.
Unfortunately, your computer's hard drive works the same way, and could break down on the side of the information superhighway at any given moment. Keep an eye out for these common degradation signs:
- The hard drive sounds like it has a something stuck in it (clicks and grinding noises).
- System hangs.
- Your computer files start disappearing.
- Poor performance.
- Longer boot times.