External hard drives are fickle devices. Sensitive to rapid movements, heat, power surges and sometimes even moods they can quickly go from being a handy device to a nightmare.
External hard drives which can include thumb drives or usb drives and easy ways to back up your important information such as documents, photos and tax information and a great place to store media or other large files which are taking up too much room on your internal hard drive like movies, music and television episodes etc.
Hard Drives In General
External hard drives mostly use (HDD) technology rather than the emerging Solid State Drives (SSD’s) so I am going to stick to referring to HDD technology. The big difference between both is the traditional hard drives has moving parts, where as the new Solid State Drives have no moving parts and are much faster.
Solid State Technology is similar to what you also see in small usb and thumb drives and because there are no moving parts, we see a lot less of them failing or being damaged.
The hard drives in side you external hard drive cases spin around thousamds of times per minute using a magnetised plate read by an arm like on the old record players.
When a hard drive is dropped or moved to quickly these small sensitive components can be displaced and damaged very easily and we see a lot more of them in comparison to the thumb drives or solid state external drives.
External Drive Becomes Raw Data
The data on your hard drive in your computer and on your external hard drive is set to a specific format. You can choose which format you would like to use such as NTFS, Fat, OSX Extended etc.
Formatting must be decide on initial use before storing data as you will most likely loose all your data if you decide to reformat and change formats on a drive with stored data.
Sometimes your computer can turn all your data on an external hard drive RAW. This basically means your hard drive is no longer readable but doesn’t necessarily mean your data isn not there.
Hard drives become RAW for all sorts of reasons such as power surges, stopping suddenly when in use, or not unmounting them properly form your computer.
Physical Failure
Physical failure is probably the worse thing that can happen to your external hard drive. Physical failure is usually a result of your external hard drive being dropped on the ground, or sudden violent impact.
This usually results in the arm reading the drive being displaced or the disks being damaged. A lot of the time this can not be fixed and if it can, can be more time consuming.
You can sometimes tell when your hard drive has had physical failure as you can hear a louder than normal distinct clicking noise when the external hard drive is plugged in and running.
More Backups
There is nothing worse than doing the right thing like backing up all your important file to an external hard drive then all of the sudden and after hardly being used to need it and it doesn’t work.
Your probably thinking where does it end but a good idea is to always make two backup of the very most important files you need.
The second backup does not always need to be to an external hard drive either. If your files are very important it probably wouldn’t hurt to back them up to another kind of media as well such as online in the cloud to a program like Dropbox or Google Drive or to a CD or DVD.
The beauty of backing up very important files to optical disks is they have no moving parts. Which means as long as you put them in a very dry secure place, when you go back to using them years down the track, if they have not been damaged from storage, will be able to be used again.
Helpful Hint
Don’t keep external hard drives plugged into your computer when you are not using them.
Hard drives, external drives and pretty much everything electronic has a shelf life and the more they are constantly being used the more wear and tare there will be.
Another problem with external hard drives we see as a backup option is people leaving them in all the time and when something happens to the computer like, virus or power surge, the external hard drive gets damaged aswell because it was plugged in at the same time as the surge. So the customer looses both the computer stored data and the external hard drive data.
Don’t leave external drives plugged in when not being used!
For all your external data and external hard drive recovery options please call Townsville computer repairs nerds on 0402 807 890.
