As I write this, my hard drive is failing. But do I care? No! Well, yes, maybe I do a little bit, but not nearly as much as if I’d been caught unawares, with a surprise failure and insufficient backup.
The hard drive is getting worse and worse, but for once in my long computing life (30+ years of having a computer as a central essential part of my daily business and personal life), I’m ready and prepared for the event.
I am setting the timetable for its eventual demise, at a time and on a basis of my choosing, rather than allowing it to surprise me at a random time of its inanimate choosing, but a time which uncannily will also be in circumstances of maximum inconvenience.
Okay, so it has taken me some 30 years to get to this happy state of preparedness – a state which required astonishingly almost no technical or other complexity, special knowledge, or even special expense.
The great news is you don’t have to wait so long to be elevated to a similar zen level of nirvana. Simply click on over to read the new article on Looking After Your Hard Drive and its Data.
David, the article about “Looking after Your Hard Drive and its Data” is really very good. I am not a big subscriber but when I read something like this I am glad that I do.
Sincerely,
Richard Locke
David, have you considered using a solid state hard drive? Here’s a link to NewEgg with quite a cornucopia of different makers and capacity: http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=636&name=Internal-SSD
Hi, Vince
Yes, I have thought about SSDs, but the last time I checked, they were appreciably less reliable than ‘old fashioned’ hard drives, and also limited in capacity and very much more expensive.
I use my laptop as my only computer. At work/home, it is in a docking station with external keyboard, mouse, monitor, and other accessories, and when I travel, I simply take it out of the docking station. So I need a large hard drive to allow me to store *everything* on it – currently I have about 500GB of data on my 750GB hard drive.
And also because the computer is a laptop, it only has one drive bay, so I couldn’t have both an SSD for speed and a regular drive for capacity in the one computer.
Sure, I could supplement an internal SSD with an external hard drive, but then, Murphy’s Law being what it is, the files I would end up needing when traveling would be ones on the stay-behind hard drive.
Lastly, even if I could resolve these issues positively, the cost (and perhaps still reliability) problem(s) remain.
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