Steps to prevent your drive failing
As I outlined above, there are a few ways a drive can fail.
Some drives are more prone to certain types of failure than others by virtue of the environment they are in. I will explain in greater detail:
- Laptop drives are more prone to failing due to head crashes and bad sectors
- Desktop drives are more prone to software errors
Those are obviously gross generalisations but my experience leads me to believe that's fairly true.
Let's start with laptops.
The reason for those drives having a greater likelihood of failing mechanically is simply that they get more abuse than a drive in a tower case. Carrying the laptop around, bumping it on things and occasionally dropping it does no favours to the hard drive.
Unless you have a MacBook of some kind, then you are likely to see this type of failure sooner or later if you own a laptop. I single out MacBooks because they have an accelerometer (think orientation sensor in iPhones) built in which detects if the laptop is subjected to any irregular forces. The instant this happens, it will park the heads of its hard drive to avoid damage.
So, to prevent disk failure when using a laptop
- Avoid knocking it especially when it's on and so forth.
- This may be really obvious to some but NEVER unplug the drive when your machine is on. Even if it says "hot-swappable". Chances are, your laptop is a single-drive machine (even if it has multiple partitions for recover and so on). Unplugging its only disk would be like pulling out your heart for a transplant without first hooking yourself up to a life support machine.
- Avoid powering down the laptop by pulling the battery out.
Desktops
Here you're more at risk of damage through unexpected power cuts than dropping your case. Unless you play frisbee with it.
If you really care about your system uptime, invest in a UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) unit and run your machine through that. It also has the dual benefit of absorbing and neutralising any power fluctuations like spikes and dips in the line, thereby "cleaning" your power feed. This means you are less at risk of blowing out something vital in your setup. It's the setup that is used on a much larger scale in all major datacentres around the world, so it's proven.
Conversely, not providing enough power to your drives can also cause them to malfunction so ensure your PSU is up to the task of powering your machine. If you have a beefy graphics card like a GTX 2xx or ATI 48xx series, you need at least a 650W PSU to run it along with the rest of your machine.
As with laptops, avoid shutting down the PC by removing the power cord. Even a forced shutdown (holding down the power button for 5 seconds) is healthier as the BIOS will send a command to the disks to park their heads.
Fun fact: the disks don't stop spinning for several seconds after you shut down your PC. Those "clicks" that you hear when your PC shuts down for good are the heads parking and then you get a "neeeoowww" noise as the platters spin down.
A final point: when installing or removing disks, try to avoid dropping them. That's never good.