Archive for June, 2009

Many of us slightly older folk will still remember the humble floppy disk which was the computing industries first real mobile storage media for the mainstream user and when first introduced was an ideal way of transferring data across computers, as long as you did not mind formatting the disk or re-writing it a number of times because of corruption on the first few attempts.

Also the USB 1.0 format was relatively new back in the day, devices that took advantage of the technology were relatively thin on the ground so if you were really lucky you did not have to get involved with larger files that often required spanning across many disks which was even more fraught with frustrastion.

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I guess we have all been there at one stage or another. You have been working on an important project, business proposal or even spent days and sometimes weeks writing an academic paper and all of a sudden the file is no longer there and panic sets in.

The first thing to do is to do a search of your folders to make sure you have not saved it in the incorrect folder and if this does not fine the elusive file you can also try having a look in the recycle bin to make sure you have not accidently deleted it. If the file can still not be found then this may be indicative that you are suffering from a degraded drive.

Much as we would like to believe a hard drive will not last forever but has a definitive life expectancy which is often referred to as a mean time between failures (MTB). MTB can often be used as a reference to a drive future reliability and calculations would put expected drive failures at less than 0.1 percent.

But oh if life was so simple!

So the big question is when is the best time to renew my hard drive so it does not suffer from any failures?

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