The hard drive isn't the most spectacular bit of hardware, but it's essential to keep your PC running smoothly. If it goes kaput, it takes all of your precious data and your applications with it. So to keep your hard drive happy, healthy and running smoothly by following these straightforward tips. We're focusing on traditional hard drives here, the large capacity disks more commonly found in desktops and all-in-ones. If you've got a nippy SSD installed in your system then a lot of these points don't apply, as there are no moving parts and data is automatically optimized.
Too many heavy anti viruses and firewalls or software that essentially do the same thing, installed on your system, just because they were freely available on some sites, or have been offered to you by your corporation, is not going to find much favor with your hard disk’s health. Two anti viruses, for an instance, especially heavy ones like Norton, constantly running scans can be torturous on your hard disk’s mechanical parts.
A simple measure to avoid software redundancy would be self audit. Every time you are about to install new software on your PC, just ask yourself if you really need that software.
Junk
Free game trials, software demos, rarely used utilities, never used services; remove them all from your PC. If you must keep them, store them in an external hard disk instead.
These are simple housekeeping tasks that help keep your hard disk in good health, and so long as your hard disk is in good health, no matter what other component of your system goes for a toss, your data is safe, you can build an entirely new computer around it and start right from where you left off.
Defragmentation
If you feel your system is running slow, diagnose the disk and see if it’s the excessive fragmentation that’s forcing your system to do too much work to squeeze files and data here and there in between those tiny free gaps. If you let your system run on an excessively fragmented disk, not only will it run slow, your disk’s life too is going to get reduced drastically. Diagnose your disk periodically, or every time you think your system is slow, and defrag it.
Backup
Backup your data on regular bases so that you will not loss you important data on Hard Drive failure. On failure your data will disappear immediately. For data recovery then you have to take help of data recovery specialists which will cost you huge amount for getting your data back, so taking backup is always better then recovery.
Disable the Hibernation File
Windows creates a hidden hibernation file at C:\hiberfil.sys. Whenever you hibernate the computer, Windows saves the contents of your RAM to the hibernation file and shuts down the computer. When it boots up again, it reads the contents of the file into memory and restores your computer to the state it was in. As this file needs to contain much of the contents of your RAM, it’s 75% of the size of your installed RAM. If you have 12 GB of memory, that means this file takes about 9 GB of space.
On a laptop, you probably don’t want to disable hibernation. However, if you have a desktop with a small solid-state drive, you may want to disable hibernation to recover the space. When you disable hibernation, Windows will delete the hibernation file. You can’t move this file off the system drive, as it needs to be on C:\ so Windows can read it at boot. Note that this file and the paging file are marked as “protected operating system files” and aren’t visible by default.
Keep it cool
Hard drives love running at room temperature-anything too hot (or indeed too cold) can play havoc with the delicate mechanisms inside the disk unit. Using a laptop in bed brings up quite a few potential problems, one of which is overheating, which can increase the strain on your hard drive and the likelihood of it wilting.
Along the same lines, make sure your desktop, laptop or all-in-one has plenty of room in which to work. Keep those desk cabinets, pot plants and winter scarves at a good distance so that the ventilation systems on your machine can work as they're intended to. If dust starts to build up around the ventilation ports at the sides of your computer then clean it away.Hard drives are very good at reporting back their current state of health and there are dozens of helpful freeware utilities that can tap into this data. HDDScan is a good option for this, as is Speccy (from the developers of the aforementioned CCleaner). DiskCheckup is another good option worth checking out and it's free for non-commercial use.
These utilities can report back on the temperature and performance of your installed hard drives, giving you an early warning system if something should go wrong. It goes without saying that you should always have backups in place-but then you already knew that, didn't you?