Computer Hardware - What you should know about Hard Drives...

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When it comes to mass storage devices, think of it like having a closet or a garage. And what do you do with garages and closets? You store your belongings, boxes, clothes or other things as well. What happens when your closet or garage is overloaded and full? You organize and compress your things so that you have more room when entering. It is the same how it works when you have a Hard Drive in your computers. Just like garages and closets, hard drives vary in storage capacity. In this day and age you will find hard drives 160GB to above up to 4TB (4,000GB). Microsoft Windows is stored in your hard drive. So Windows works with your hard drive, the more you put in your computer - data, documents, mp3s and such it will add up in your storage capacity. Remember that Hard Drives spin at around 7,200RPM per second, when you start your computer, it spins to load Windows. What you store in your hard drive it will store your files in its direct location. Now treating a hard drive like a garage or closet Microsoft Windows has a program called Disk Defragment - which ogranizes, optimizes, and compresses more free space and to pack in files to give more breathing room for storage. It is always good to defragment when needed that's if you are an everyday user on a computer. Now remember hard drives spin most of the time when you're using your computer. If for some reason you're doing your routines on your system and you happen to shut down your system improperly maybe say you unplug your system or a brownout occurs - that can cause issues with your hard drive causing it to crash. Another issue with hard drives it can get overloaded, not spin properly, gets exhausted and then generate errors that will not run properly when using Windows. One of the common things is that when you start your computer it might say Error reading Disk or you start up Windows it loads very very slow. Say you had a external hard drive to load files - and it gets stuck for some reason that results in a bad hard drive. If one were to try to format and hard drive and it fails to do so, that hard drive has failed. There are numerous issues that can cause a hard drive to crash. Now speaking of brands - either way you are best to pick the right ones. Western Digital is a great hard drive, so are Seagate Barrudas, Hitachi IBM for laptops. I recommend these because for one I hardly come across issues of these hard drives to crash. I've tried other brands such as samsung, maxtor - and had those crash multiple times. So then, make sure you don't overload your hard drive. If you have files in your system you want to back up - use a pen drive, memory card or any other storage device. Burn your files on CD or DVD. Store your files in a shelf or case. All this information can help you in the long run.