Hard drives, the beating heart of your computer or laptop. Just like your own heart, you don’t really pay it any attention until something goes wrong.

Unlike human physiology, the computer’s anatomy is somewhat more predictable. There are several reasons that drives can fail and several methods you can try before you have to resort to the experts for hard drive data recovery.

Power Surge or Power Out

Unfortunately, not something we have much control over but you’ll be able to tell if it’s the cause of your device’s failure through the following symptoms: your start-up programme won’t be able to detect the hard drive, it may crash before starting up fully and you won’t hear that tell-tale spinning sound of a functional drive.

The first thing to do is check that your power socket and fuses are right for your device. The next step is to try removing your hard drive and hooking it up to another computer or laptop through an adaptor to see if your files are intact.

The Human Touch

You may not be able to physically see your hard drive but that doesn’t mean you can’t cause it any damage.

Altering your system files and other technical specifications can be a recipe for disaster. The simple answer is that, unless you know exactly what you’re doing, leave well alone and call in the experts to make any adjustments to these fundamental settings.

Heat

Probably the most common reason for hard drive failure. You see it when your mobile phone overheats and it’s the same for computers and laptops. In some cases you’ll be able to simply feel how hot your machine is getting and that’s the time to switch it off and leave in a cool room before any major damage is incurred.

The reason devices overheat is generally down to the internal fans not functioning properly. There are several methods to dealing with this issue, but again unless you are a technical whizz it’s best left in the hands of the experts to fix. You can, however, get a heads up on your desktop’s heat status with some free software that will alert you to a risky rise in temperature inside your computer.

Faulty Goods

There are times when there’s nothing you could have done to prevent your hard drive giving up the ghost. These times most often happen when the device you bought had manufacturing errors. It’s rare but it does happen. Annoying for a personal user, potentially devastating for a business.

Don’t even attempt to fix this yourself, make use of that warranty protection and take it straight back to where it came from. If you are able to, try and remove any files you need before you lose sight of the machine. If you’re on a network, have your team’s devices checked for similar problems and switch to an alternative for damage limitation.

Protecting your hard drive from failure may not be entirely possible but protecting your files is a necessity. Start backing up today and prevent a disaster before it occurs.