The Problem with Hard Drives

23. October 2010 by admin.

About a year ago I built a new pc from scratch.  I’ve done it before it really isn’t all that hard and you get a much more powerful pc for the price you pay.  For the second time in the past 20 years though I have had a hard drive fail.  Lucky for me it was my backup drive so the recovery will be much easier.  Twenty years, 2 hard drives, not a bad ratio but when I started looking for a new drive to install I wanted to insure I found one rated well by other builders and unlikely to fail again.  I have to admit to being somewhat surprised by what I found.  I buy all my hardware from NewEgg.com, the prices are cheap, no sales tax, and it’s a well respected company for getting your computer parts.  Once you purchase something you have the option to rate it, much like you may see on other sites such as Amazon.

 I wanted a new drive with at least 1TB of space so I limited my search to that and found 85 matches.  Out of the 85 only 1 had a 5 star rating by users.  That was a Samsung Spinpoint 5400 RPM, 2TB drive, but even that one had 7% 1 and 2 star reviews.  So, whats a pc builder to do?  In the end I decided it’s basically a crap shoot.  Pick one with at least a 4 or 5 star rating and make sure you have a backup drive.  Once you have a backup drive installed, USE IT!  You don’t have to set up a fancy RAID system, just use the Windows backup utility to schedule a regular(i.e. weekly) backup to a dedicated drive for just that.  Frankly I’m paranoid enough about losing my data I also store some of my important data in the ‘cloud’ (encrypted) just to give me a little more piece of mind.   Bottom line, don’t expect your hard drive to last forever.  They ALL fail at some point.  If you don’t feel comfortable enough to open your case and install a second drive you can now get external drives that connect to your pc via a USB connection for very reasonable prices.

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