There are a lot of ways a hard drive can fail. Remember, a hard drive has several moving parts and wear and tear will eventually win out. There are acuator arms that move up and down at a tremendous rate to read and write data on high speed platters every second a hard drive is running. Talk about stress and possible problems, these little devils are absolutely in constant motion for the life of the hard drive.
So wear and tear is the number one cause of failure. Now think about the heating up and cooling down processes each time the computer is turned on and off. Hard drives have to spin up fast to allow you computer to boot up, often at 7200 rpm and even faster. This generates heat, lots of it. And when you constantly heat up and cool down metal parts, it causes some wear and tear each time it occurs.
And in natural disasters like fire, tornados, hurricanes, or flooding it is rare that we can save the data. Or consider the possibility of theft, especially with laptops which is all too common these days. Websites like Dropbox.com offer free (up to 2 gigs) and paid methods that only take about 5 minutes to setup and can be a real life saver if a catastrophic failure hits your hard drive. And there are several other free and paid versions of this type of automated daily backup service. There really is no excuse to not backup data these days.
Just like death and taxes, hard drives will eventually go belly up. It's never a good thing but if you have current backups, it becomes more of a bump in the road rather than a total disaster. Many times you have user created data like pictures, videos, or important documents that cannot be replaced. Don't put this items at risk, back them up. You can even do it manually but many times you'll forget or not have the time when you think about it. That's why it's a great idea to setup an automated method and then you don't have to worry about it.
So what kind of speeds can you expect from these new hot rod SSD devices? I do computer repair for a living and anytime a traditional hard drive fails I mention that they can go with a SSD replacement. I tell them you can get a good 7200 RPM SATA 500 gig hard drive for around $70. Or, you can get one of the new SSD 240 Gig drives for about $185. Depending on their computer (later models are necessary to handle the 6 Gig transfer rate), many go with the SSD after they hear about the actual increases in speed.
Just what kind of improvement can you get from an SSD versus a traditional hard drive? I've replaced the hard drives in both MacBooks and Windows laptop computers and the improvements are very similar. The original hard drives were 5400 RPM Fujitsu drives. Boot time on the Windows laptops went from about 48 seconds to 21 seconds. When you are sitting there waiting for your computer to boot, that's huge. How about copying files? Well, on about 11 gigs the difference was a little over one minute on the SSD and a little over five minutes on the traditional hard drive.And speaking of laptops, there are two other factors that come into play with the SSD replacement. They run silent and take far less energy. And on laptops that's a big deal since you want your battery to last as long as possible and less noise is always a good thing. So there is even more reasons to upgrade on a laptop model besides performance.
So wear and tear is the number one cause of failure. Now think about the heating up and cooling down processes each time the computer is turned on and off. Hard drives have to spin up fast to allow you computer to boot up, often at 7200 rpm and even faster. This generates heat, lots of it. And when you constantly heat up and cool down metal parts, it causes some wear and tear each time it occurs.
And in natural disasters like fire, tornados, hurricanes, or flooding it is rare that we can save the data. Or consider the possibility of theft, especially with laptops which is all too common these days. Websites like Dropbox.com offer free (up to 2 gigs) and paid methods that only take about 5 minutes to setup and can be a real life saver if a catastrophic failure hits your hard drive. And there are several other free and paid versions of this type of automated daily backup service. There really is no excuse to not backup data these days.
Just like death and taxes, hard drives will eventually go belly up. It's never a good thing but if you have current backups, it becomes more of a bump in the road rather than a total disaster. Many times you have user created data like pictures, videos, or important documents that cannot be replaced. Don't put this items at risk, back them up. You can even do it manually but many times you'll forget or not have the time when you think about it. That's why it's a great idea to setup an automated method and then you don't have to worry about it.
So what kind of speeds can you expect from these new hot rod SSD devices? I do computer repair for a living and anytime a traditional hard drive fails I mention that they can go with a SSD replacement. I tell them you can get a good 7200 RPM SATA 500 gig hard drive for around $70. Or, you can get one of the new SSD 240 Gig drives for about $185. Depending on their computer (later models are necessary to handle the 6 Gig transfer rate), many go with the SSD after they hear about the actual increases in speed.
Just what kind of improvement can you get from an SSD versus a traditional hard drive? I've replaced the hard drives in both MacBooks and Windows laptop computers and the improvements are very similar. The original hard drives were 5400 RPM Fujitsu drives. Boot time on the Windows laptops went from about 48 seconds to 21 seconds. When you are sitting there waiting for your computer to boot, that's huge. How about copying files? Well, on about 11 gigs the difference was a little over one minute on the SSD and a little over five minutes on the traditional hard drive.And speaking of laptops, there are two other factors that come into play with the SSD replacement. They run silent and take far less energy. And on laptops that's a big deal since you want your battery to last as long as possible and less noise is always a good thing. So there is even more reasons to upgrade on a laptop model besides performance.
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