Crash and Burn | Hard Drive Maintenance

Jan 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Steve Oppenheimer

WHY HARD DRIVES FAIL AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

BONUS MATERIAL
More on Care and Feeding for Your Hard Drive

Let it be

Moving or tilting a hard drive while powering up is dangerous to its health.

Perform regular maintenance

Make preventive maintenance a part of your weekly routine. Use disk utility software to detect and fix a variety of disk problems, such as corrupt file directories and bad sectors. Don't wait until your computer slows down and you suspect a problem.

Mac OS X comes with Disk Utility (found in the Applications folder), which enables you to verify and repair the disk and the disk permissions (see Fig. 5). Windows XP includes Chkdsk; to use it, choose Start→Run and then type chkdsk.exe. You can also use third-party Mac and Windows disk utilities, which often have more features (see the online bonus material “Your Utility Belt”).

Get SMART

SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) is built into many modern hard drives. It monitors more than 35 attributes of drive performance, including temperature, calibration, bad sectors, spin-up time, and the distance between the heads and the platter(s). You need SMART-savvy disk utility software (see Fig. 6) to access this information.

Defragment

I discussed defragmentation and optimization earlier, in the “Logic Failure” section.

Mac OS X: ensure that the OS does its maintenance routines

OS X automatically performs certain background maintenance tasks that can affect your boot drive. By default, these tasks are scheduled to run between 3:15 and 5:30 a.m., and if your computer is shut down or asleep, the maintenance can't be done. In that case, reschedule these tasks or run them manually using a third-party program such as Atomic Bird Macaroni 2.1.1 ($9.99; atomicbird.com/macaroni) or Brian R. Hill's MacJanitor 1.3 (free; personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill/macjanitor.html). You can also run the maintenance tasks using the Terminal application.

Don't record audio projects to your boot disk

Because audio files are large and we edit them extensively, the drive where you store them can become fragmented relatively quickly. In addition, audio drives in studios work long and hard. If you record to a drive other than your boot drive, it will be easier to mind your audio drive's health, and your boot drive will last longer.

Go on a RAID

If you have a professional project studio and can afford the investment, consider using a RAID 1 disk array for critical audio file storage. (For more on RAID, see the online bonus material “Mirror, Mirror.”)

Tighten it up

If you have an internal drive that's acting a bit strange — say, it's constantly spinning — check to make sure that the drive is fully seated, all contacts are clean, and all connections are tight.

The Rest of the Story

There is much more to learn about hard-drive failure and data safety, so be sure to read the five useful sidebars in the online bonus material. This should give you enough information to begin a drive-maintenance program and to prepare for the evil day that you know is coming. I suggest you start now. Remember, back up first — because nothing in life is certain except death and hard-drive failure.

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Former EM editor in chief Steve Oppenheimer bought another backup drive while writing this story.