There is nothing worse than loosing all your data files, programs, photos, movies and documents.
Loosing valuable data can be irreplaceable for people and organisations who do not back. For some it can means years of tax records and customer details, and others it could mean a life time of memories, weddings and baby photos.
If its important to you, its important enough to back up.
Backing up usually doesn’t take long, specially if you make it a habit and in the long run can save you years of work.
That’s because hard drives are terribly unreliable, and hard drives fails all the time, we see it every day.
But, to paint a pictures where one scenario serves all would be unjust. There are many different types of hard drives which do more of the same things differently.
Knowing what type of hard drives you need for what type of situation can help you get longer out of your hard drive, more reliability and a better overall performance.
Hard Disk Drives
These are drives you might have seen and have been used in traditional computers for many years.
They basically work like a record players, with a disk inside of them spinning around with an arm reading and writing the information to it and it spins around.
Because of the moving parts and the sensitive arm and disks, it doesn’t take much of a knock to damage the drive and render your disks unusable.
We see these mostly fail in laptops which get picked up a lot, shoved in bags and moved around from desk to backpack and back and forth.
They are not very fast, at least compared to the new SSD drives.
Solid State Drives
SSD’s are the newer hard drive technology and are like the USB thumb drives but on a bigger scales.
They have no moving parts and are upwards of 5 times faster than traditional hard drives.
As they are newer technology and have no moving parts they fail a lot less than normal hard drives and we only see these come in when people have damaged them like water spillage or because the circuity and simply failed and been faulty.
Storage Systems
If you are using a computer for storage only, or to serve other people files and services, you are probably better to go with the normal hard disk drives.
As servers do not usually get moved around a lot and need lots of space for files, a traditional hard drive should work just fine.
If you still need speed to operate the system, you can always have a solid state hard drive for the operating system files and a normal hard drive for the storage component.
However, just because you do not move the server much does not mean the hard drives still might not fail.
Server and storage systems should back up even more then personal computers as they store so much information. Backup as often as possible.
Personal Computer
Solid state hard drives are more expensive and smaller than traditional hard drives. Never the less, with decrease in prices, and because of the performance boost, solid state drives are the best option for personal computers.
If you are using your personal computer every day for general use, entertainment, business or gaming, solid state hard drives give your computer amazing bang for your buck and performance enhancements.
Sick of your computer taking 5 minutes to start up, a solid state hard drive could probably bring even an older computer down to 15 seconds to start with the right configuration.
Also, if you are using a solid state hard drive in a laptop which gets picked up and moved a lot around, a solid state hard drive with no moving parts will be more robust than a normal external hard drive.
Bottom Line
All hard drives are unreliable. What you have million billion technology, mass produced and manufactured for a few dollars on the assembly line and they fail so often.
Its a big numbers game, so you have to play the odds. Back up as often as possible, to as many devices and hard drives as possible. And when the day does come you hard drive fails, and it will, it wont matter as you will have multiple copies of your precious files.
