There are many different types of media which can store your precious data (photos, music, movies documents and work files).
Media is usually referred to when talking about stored files, as the thing which is holding your data or storing it such as external hard drive, computer hard drive, usb thumb drive or CD, DVD or Blu-ray Disk
Living in Townsville poses many different challenges as opposed to living in other colder southern states.
Townsville has the terribly hot season (most of the year) and the rainy season (sometimes) which both can cause damage to computers and data.
This post is going to talk about data recovery specifically dealing with hard drive recovery in Townsville.
What is a computer hard drive
I guess if we are going to talk about computer hard drive data recovery we first need to know what exactly is a computer hard drive.
Your hard drive in your computer is the disk (usually C:) which holds your information such as personal and business files as well as your operating system (eg. Windows, OSX, Linux) and programs such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Office or Photoshop etc.
There are two types of hard drives now. A standard HDD (Hard Disk Drive) and the new and much faster SDD (Solid State Drive).
For the purpose of this post I will be referring to the standard Hard Disk Drive as that is what most people still have in their computers and external drives.
How does a Hard Disk Drive work
A lot like the old records before CD and MP3s, people uses to listen to music. A hard drive has a circular magnetic disk called a platter and a arm which reads the data called a actuator.
As the platter spins around the head on the end of the actuator reads and writes information from the disk to deliver to the operating system, programs and user.
If you pull the hard drive out of the computer you will see it has its own circuit board on the outside of it which controls the flow of data to and from the platter.
Hard drives have been around since the mid 1950’s and although they technology has got a lot better, until the new Solid State Drives came out, Hard Drives have basically worked on the same premise.
Heat in Townsville
Hard drives hate heat. Although they are built to withstand constant vibration and movement from the disk platers, they run very hot which is a problem sometimes in Townsville the soaring temperatures.
I always like to keep my computer or laptop and hard drives in the coolest place possible in the house or in air conditioning to try and shield them as much as possible from the soaring Townsville heat,
Dust in Townsville
A lot of people make the mistake of taking the hard drives apart themselves.
It can be very interesting to have a look inside a hard drive and see how it works. But what you probably don’t realise is when the disks are exposed to the air, unless the room is dust free and you are wearing anti static devices, you will probably do damage to the disks without even touching them.
Townsville has lots of dust and if any of that (microscopic) dust gets onto the platters, you can very easily loose your data and ruin the disk.
Water in Townsville
You’d think it would be pretty hard to get water on your hard drive and yes it is. Lets just exclude thunderstorms and floods.
But, if you were to take your hard drive apart and even if their was no dust in the air, Townsville is very hot. People don’t realise how much the sweat and even the smallest amount of sweat you might not be able to see or moisture in the air from the Townsville topical climate can cause damage to the disk platters.
