Preparing for Hard Drive Failures

As the adage goes, there are two things you can't escape from: death and taxes. The former is true as well for our hard drives. It's a fact of life, hard drive failures are inevitable no matter how carefully you choose your computer, no matter how impressive the specs are, and no matter how conscientiously you take care of them.

To prepare for the eventual demise of your hard drives, take to heart this magic word: backup. It's much easier to replace a broken hard drive; lost data is more painful. In backing up your files, external hard drives are your best friend. They have just as much, if not more, storage space than the hard disk on your PC so you can have backup copies of all your files stored in them.

The important thing is to handle the external hard drives properly and to use them only when you're backing up or restoring files. That way, they won't be worn out easily and can be counted on to safely store your backup files.

You may also use a desktop PC with a version of RAID that has built-in data redundancy. One of its version is mirroring which requires a controller and two hard drives of the same size. When data is stored in one hard drive, it is also automatically copied on the other so that when a drive crashes, your data is still safe in the other drive.