Caring For Your Hard Drive

Your hard drive is also a fairly rugged animal. However you should take precautions to prevent unnecessary data loss. Several tips are listed below:

  1. Never, never, never, move your PC while it is turned on. Movement may cause a head crash resulting in massive loss of data.
  2. After much use, your hard drive may develop fragmented files on your hard drive. This means that a file is stored all over the hard drive instead of one place. This will increase your hard drive's access time which means you wait longer for your hard drive to do read/write operations. You can use a special software to to "defrag" your hard drive on a regular basis.

    1. Windows 95, DOS 6.1, and 6.2 contain a command called Defrag. Check your operating system manual for instructions on how to use this command.

      Disk defragmentation software is also available from your local computer store.

Finally, remember, a hard drive will eventually wear out. It has moving parts. Although improving technology has increased the life expectancy and reliability of hard drives, they will eventually fail. The bottom line, make a backup or your data! In other words, copy the data on your hard drive to a floppy disk. That way, if your hard drive fails, you have not lost your precious data.