Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Check yourself- When Your Hard Drive is Going to Fail (Stellar SMART)

If you have used PCs over the course of your career, I am sure you are well aware of the dreaded "click of death" that occurs when a disk drive fails. These failures can be devastating, and usually cost companies and individuals thousands of dollars, and a good deal of stress. Hard drives form the basis of our computing. The use of computers down to manipulating data, and the hard drive is, of course, where we store all our data; family albums, music, work documents, email, the list goes on.

There is lots of causes for hard drive failure and few of them are following:

Head Failure

Media Failure

Physical Damage

Mechanical Failures

Virus Attack

Logical Failures

Disk manufacturers have added S.M.A.R.T features to their drives. The acronym stands for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology. With it drives have technology to monitor aspects of their status and report it. It has become an industry standard. Whether it is used in your direct-attached storage or drive arrays is another matter. SMART is a method through which devices monitor, store and analyze information on their operational state. This state information is exported through a set of attributes (e.g., temperature, number of reallocated sectors, seeks errors).

The occurrences of errors can be noted and compared to standard performance parameters encoded in the diagnostic system. Let's suppose the drive begins to take longer to reach spin speed, and that more retries are needed to attain full rpm, then it can indicate that the drive's bearings or motor are likely to fail. A most valuable data recovery company Stellar releases Stellar Smart drive monitoring software that gives the current values of various hard disk parameters such as Temperature, Head Flying Height, Spin-Up Time etc. If you have this software then it’s a lot easier to back-up than to get your data recovered. Once you detect any of the signs of failure you need to ensure that you have a back-up and if not, make one

Hard drives are incredibly sensitive bits of hardware, so don’t try to crack it open and have a look inside unless you know what you’re doing. And most definitely ensure that if you do crack it open, the platters don’t get exposed to the open air. In case of hard drive crash contact data recovery specialist. Stellar’s Data Recovery Services (DRS) offers personalized inspection of damaged hard disks, particularly to physically damaged disks which are rendered immune to recovery using software.