Hard Drives Need Care Too: Look After Them Carefully!
What are the deadly sins to avoid as a user or administrator? The first has nothing to do with hard drives as such: Don't forget to back up your data! For home use, a copy of important data on CD or DVD suffices since a Windows system can be easily put to rights on a quiet evening. In the corporate environment, sophisticated backup and restore strategies are called for. These in turn are based on regular backups and/or technically complex systems.
Avoid vibrations, especially when the drive is running, wide temperature fluctuations, magnetic fields, humidity and, above all, overheating. Inexperienced users tend to forget to cool their jam-packed computer systems. Sometimes, they even put hard drives directly on top of each other. That's not something you'll want to do and your drive will thank you with a longer life.
It's unlikely you'll ever see anything like this in professional scenarios: There, hard drives are mounted in 19" racks where they are kept cool by a number of powerful fans. Airconditioning in computer rooms is also standard equipment. That is actually a decisive factor to contributing to a suitably operated hard drive's longevity. A RAID system, based on numerous Athlon systems viewed by us and IDE RAID arrays prove this.
