how to protect hard drives

hi:

the hard drive on my dektop just quit working (not sure how, found that out after i came back from vacation). obviously i didn't turn the sytem off.

what likely causes this? the motherboard seems to be fine once i plugged in a new hard drive and it boots up from new drive (i assume lighting would kill both).

how could i provent this happen again? i am thinking 1) buy a nice surge protector (assuming it was lighting). 2) turn it off when i am not around (not so nice idea if i want to use it as unix server). or it just a bad drive (it is damn new, only less than two years old and i didn't use that system that mcuh since i have working laptop).

thanks

You can check the warranty on the drive too - it may still be under the manufacturer's warranty. Also you can run diagnostic tools that are manufacturer specific or you can get a bunch of them w/ the ultimate boot cd.

I'd turn it off for sure if I went on vacation... and get a surge protector if you don't have one already! Unless you want to see your capacitors' guts all over your dead computer.

I doubt it was a surge or your power supply unit would have made for some good 4th of july fireworks. Normally, when that goes, everything in the pc will recieve 100volts. So i don't think thats waht killed it.

hmmm, first i noticed the system just hung right after bios checking; biso could see the drive but wd utility could not format that drive. when the system reboots, i can hear the clicks from the drive...

i gave it up, too busy to deal with it (really not worthy of time). just bought a seagate and hopefully it will be good. not that much of money but the losss of information was annoying

You'd think that everything in your house would be fried after it getting hit by lightning. A surge protector isn't going to magically save your equipment from that much potential (voltage). I figure that if lightning can travel all the way from clouds to the ground that it could probably travel accross that little gap that a surge protector provides for insulation (assuming the proper conditions are met).

Aren't surge protectors only meant for spikes in power generation (due to loss of load and the frequency jumping up)?

Echoplex

two years old? well in terms of usage, it probably only.. say about two three months? most of time i use my laptop and besides, i wasn't at home for almost a year.

There is very little if anything that you can do to prevent a hard drive from failing.

A hard drive is a *mechanical* device. In some ways, a very sophisticated one. Being mechanical in nature, it is subject to wear and tear. Some drives will experience accelerated wear due to minute deviations from the specs during manufacturing.

One of the few things you can do is to enable "S.M.A.R.T" in your BIOS. This causes your BIOS to interrogate the drives present about their health. After a fairly quick self test, each drive will report its status to the BIOS. If something is wrong on any drive (and presuming the drives can perform a S.M.A.R.T self test) then you'll get a message during POST letting you know that a given drive is about to fail. The typical message is "Drive x failure is imminent. Backup your data immediately". Heed the warning, drives that issue it usually don't last much longer.

You can purchase SCSI drives. SCSI drives are tested much more rigorously than IDE drives. Less of them reach the market having minute problems that grow into big problems.

Backup your data often no matter what kind of drive you have.

HTH.