Why Do Hard Drives Fail?

I guess we have all been there at one stage or another. You have been working on an important project, business proposal or even spent days and sometimes weeks writing an academic paper and all of a sudden the file is no longer there and panic sets in.

You check your deleted files with no luck and do a full search on your computer but the file or folder has simply vanished. In all probability the file is still on your hard disk but for some reason cannot be found which may be the first signs of a degraded drive.

Much as we would like to believe a hard drive will not last forever but has a definitive life expectancy which is often referred to as a mean time between failures (MTB). MTB can often be used as a reference to a drive future reliability and calculations would put expected drive failures at less than 0.1 percent.

Unfortunately life isn’t always that straight forward!

A question often asked is how long should a hard drive be expected to last before requiring replacement?

This is one of those wide open questions that will have experts arguing until the cows come home because there are a wide variety of factors that come into play.

The actual usage of the hard disk will play a large part in your decision for example a hard drive used in a low use machine may last 5 years or longer as the drive is not being used very much at all or only stores a relatively small amount of data.

The same expectation could be applied to the many mid range computer users which includes office Pc’s laptops and home desktop systems, where users have a small number of programs in use and small amounts of data or if data is stored on a central server.

But for power users it is an entirely different story. Extreme gamers and users of high end commercial applications will be driving their systems very hard indeed and the amount of data that is shifted into swap files or written back to the disk is huge so its only reasonable to expect disk life to be shorter and the chances of drive failure or disk degradation to be far higher.

High end computer users using high end applications will often have a much shorter expected life of their system, and desktop refresh tends to be around 3 years or so to avoid disk failure and to keep them at the cutting edge of computing productivity which is important for a business.

If a hard working drive’s life were to be extended then it would be reasonable to see an increasing ramp up in disk failures over time or drive degradation.

During challenging economic times, business computer refresh programs are often put of to protect working capital which on the face of it can be seen as a sound business decision but there can be a large bite to this policy if an essential drive or server fails with a resultant loss of business critical data.

Computer support and repair companies advising businesses that are intending to stretch there refresh policies would be advised to ensure they have adequate desktop or online data backup protocols in place to be on the safe side.

Another prime factor affecting the longevity of the drive is of course disk maintenance. If your hard drive is allowed to become fragmented then it will have to work an awful lot harder to pick up information and in extreme cases of hard disk fragmentation drives can get very stressed to the point of failure.

You should be able to recover a deleted file or a lost file provided you have not overwritten the sector with additional data, so if the file is really important try not to write anything else to the drive, and avoid the temptation to use data recovery software for important files.

Your local data recovery provider will be able to help with all your data recovery and file recovery
needs and will do there utmost to ensure the original data integrity is maintained.