To HDD(HDD) served for a long time, pleased high speed work and does not fail at one point, putting an end to all the information that was recorded on it - it needs to be given attention and periodically maintained. In today's article we will give some tips, if followed, you can extend the life of the HDD by a couple of years.

​Proper installation.

At the dawn of personal computers as we know them today, hard drives could function exclusively in a horizontal position, this was due to the presence of ball bearings in them. In the early 2000s, hard drives were manufactured using hydrodynamic bearings and could operate in any position. At the same time, it still doesn’t hurt to monitor the correct location of the HDD and especially its secure fastening in the case.

Reliable fastening.

In many system units installation provided hard drive on special slides or pins. Despite the fact that this is quite convenient, we still recommend mounting the HDD with bolts. This measure will reduce vibration and therefore preserve the resource of the hard drive.

​We monitor the temperature.

Critical working temperature For hard drives 55-60 degrees Celsius and above. If these values ​​are exceeded, a catastrophic reduction in the overall service life occurs. To determine the HDD temperature, just install the program: Speed ​​Fan, Everest, Aida, etc. When hard temperature disk exceeds the recommended values, it is necessary to think about measures to reduce it. In the case of a system unit, you need to install hard drives through one bay and place a fan on the front panel. With a laptop, unfortunately, everything is not so simple due to its compact body - in this case the temperature will have to be reduced by more better cooling other components ( central processor, graphics card and northbridge). To do this, it will be enough to carry out scheduled maintenance to clean the cooling system from dust, replace thermal paste and thermal pads.

We avoid physical influences.

From time to time, unexpected problems occur with external HDDs and laptop hard drives, resulting in a device failure in which it is impossible to recover information. The fact is that the class of devices as HDD implies their stationary state during operation, which is not always the case in practice. The fact is that the read head is located at a microscopic distance from the surface of the disk and any vibration or unexpected impact can result in damage to the surface or the read head itself. Considering that many people carry a laptop turned on, and about external HDDs no need to say - this problem is very topical. Therefore, we recommend that you turn off your laptop before moving it and be very careful when handling external HDDs.

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Problems with hard drives are very common, and many users do not know what to do in such situations. And every program for hard repair The disk is designed to perform certain actions depending on the type of failure. Below we suggest that you familiarize yourself with some types of failures and software allowing them to be eliminated.

Checking and repairing your hard drive: Windows programs and tools

Before using such a tool, you need to find out the nature of the failure. Among the main types are the following:

• violation of the file system structure;
• damage to the hard drive surface;
• software errors;
• loss of information due to failures or formatting.

Don't underestimate the tools presented in operating systems Windows. Hardware repair program Windows disk 7 or any other system is called ScanDisk and in the simplest case it is called from the section properties menu, where the scan button is used on the service tab.

In this case, you need to specify automatic correction bad sectors, and if desired, you can also use surface testing.

However, using a similar applet (chkdsk) called from command line(cmd), launched with administrator rights in the Run console, looks much preferable. For this tool you need to enter additional attributes. Among the most frequently used are the checks with space-separated combinations /f /r and /x /f /r. If system components are damaged, you can use the sfc /scannow command.

The best applications for hard drive treatment and data recovery

In order not to deal with the procedures described above, many users also use third-party utilities, among which the following can be highlighted:

• HDD Regenerator.
• Victoria.
• R. Saver.
• Acronis Recovery Expert.
• Hetman Partition Recovery etc.

Let us immediately note that applications like Recuva, designed to recover deleted files or missing information from damaged HDDs, will not be considered only because of their absolute ineffectiveness.

HDD Regenerator

HDD Regenerator is a relatively recently developed program for diagnosing and repairing a hard drive, designed not to restore lost information, but to search for problems associated with physical damage to hard drives or software failures.

According to its creators, the work is based on the principle of reversing the magnetization of the HDD surface, which makes it possible to completely restore the performance of the hard drive. It works in DOS mode, which causes users some problems with use, however, in some cases it shows good results when no other tool helps.

Victoria

The Viktoria hard drive repair program from Belarusian developers, according to most professionals, is the best in its field and allows you to eliminate many software problems associated with the file system, bad sectors, etc.

It can be launched in two versions: in DOS mode emulation and in the form standard Windows application. However, as noted, it is better to use the first method, since checking in this mode is more effective, not to mention eliminating failures and errors (such as differences in startup standard means Windows).

R.Saver

The R.Saver hard drive repair program is designed to recover deleted or lost information. Its use is justified because the utility is able to find files, which may include important system components, even after formatting the disk or logical partition, completely reconstructing the file system.

Scanning, however, takes quite a lot of time, but the application finds files that the user may not even be aware of. And in most cases, using this program is the best option even for removable USB HDDs, flash drives and memory cards of any standard.

Acronis Recovery Expert

This hard drive repair program is mainly used when the file system structure is damaged and even allows you to create bootable media for those cases when starting the OS from a hard drive becomes impossible.

At the same time, the application supports a huge number of file systems and large hard drives.

Hetman Partition Recovery

Although this utility is positioned as a means of recovering information if it is lost after formatting or software failures, however, can be used to find problems with the HDD.

The main advantage of the application is that it can be launched either manually or using a special “Wizard”, which makes it possible to automate the processes of analysis (scanning) and data recovery.

Results

These are not all programs capable of servicing hard drives, but only a few of the most popular ones. But even a brief acquaintance with them allows any user to understand the principles of their functioning and areas of application. If we recommend a universal solution, at the first stage of repair you need to use system tools (if possible), HDD Regenerator or Viktoria, and for subsequent information recovery - R.Saver or other software products.

The Start All Programs Standard System Disk Cleanup command opens a window (Fig. 4.7), which presents a mode for cleaning local disks from outdated, unused and unnecessary files.

In this window, select the required disk from the drop-down list and click OK - the cleaning program will begin scanning the selected disk to see how much space can be freed up on it and what files can be deleted. The scan will take a certain amount of time (usually ranging from 30 seconds to several minutes) depending on the power of the computer and the amount of installed software. The results of the process will be displayed

in a window consisting of two tabs: Disk Cleanup and Advanced (Fig. 4.8).

On the Disk Cleanup tab, you can select the type of files to delete (for example, files contained in the Recycle Bin, temporary files, etc.). To select the required item, check the box to the left of it. In this case, the information line Amount of freed space shows the amount of freed disk space with these settings. Some folders with files can be opened for viewing by highlighting the corresponding list position with the mouse pointer and clicking the View Files button.

On the Advanced tab, you can configure additional cleaning options if necessary. local disk. Using the corresponding buttons, you can delete unused Windows components or programs that have not been used for a long time. You can also free up additional disk space by deleting system restore points - clicking the corresponding button will delete all restore points except the most recent one.

The disk cleanup process is started with the OK button. You can use the Cancel button to exit this mode without saving changes.

Why is disk defragmentation needed and how to do it

Using the Start All Programs Accessories System Tools Disk Defragmentation command, a program is launched that is designed to defragment the local disks of the computer, which allows you to optimize the system and increase its performance.

The meaning of this action is as follows. In the process of deleting unnecessary files and folders, free “spaces” are created in different places on the hard drive. New documents and directories are written to these free spaces on the hard drive, thus they are fragmented, that is, divided into fragments and stored in different places on the hard drive. As a result, access to specific files slows down, which ultimately negatively affects system performance. After defragmenting the hard drive, such files and folders are combined (that is, their fragments are located in adjacent sectors of the hard drive). In other words, defragmentation allows you to organize the location of files and folders stored on your hard drive, speeding up access to them.

NOTE

When you execute the Disk Defragmentation command, the defragmentation program window opens (Fig. 4.9).

This window provides a list of all partitions on the computer's hard drive. The corresponding columns for each disk display its name, date and time of the last defragmentation, as well as information about the percentage of fragmentation. Before defragmentation, it is recommended to analyze the state of the current disk to determine whether this action is appropriate. To do this, select the corresponding disk in the list with the mouse pointer and click the Analyze disk button. After analysis, information will be displayed in brackets

about what percentage of disk space is fragmented. Figure 4.9 shows that only 1% of the space on drive D: is fragmented, therefore, there is no need for defragmentation.

To get started defragmentation of hard disk, click the Disk Defragmenter button. In this case, the Progress column will display information about this process(Fig. 4.10).

Ministry of Education and Youth Policy

AU CR SPO "Cheboksary Mechanical Engineering College"

Course project

Discipline: Maintenance of electronic equipment and computer networks

On the topic: Maintenance and repair of HDD hard drives

Explanatory note

KP.230106.007.282.000.P3

Completed by a student from group 4VT1

Ivanov Anatoly Igorevich

Checked:

Teacher: Monakov A.A.

Cheboksary 2011-2012 academic year

INTRODUCTION

An important element modern computer is a hard drive - "winchester", HDD. Externally, it is a relatively small box, inside of which there is not one, but a whole stack of disks coated with a magnetic layer. To read and write information, a magnetic head is attached to each disk in this stack. The rotation of the disks and the movement of the magnetic heads is ensured by electric motors and control electronic circuits.

Hard magnetic disk drive or HDD (English hard (magnetic) disk drive, HDD, HMDD), hard drive, in computer slang “hard drive” - a random access storage device (information storage device), based on the principle of magnetic recording. It is the main data storage device in most computers.

Unlike a “floppy” disk (floppy disk), information in a hard disk drive is recorded on hard (aluminum or glass) plates coated with a layer of ferromagnetic material, most often chromium dioxide - magnetic disks. HDD uses one or more plates on one axis. In operating mode, the reading heads do not touch the surface of the plates due to the layer of incoming air flow that forms near the surface during rapid rotation. The distance between the head and the disk is several nanometers (about 10 nm in modern disks), and the absence of mechanical contact ensures a long service life of the device. When the disks do not rotate, the heads are located at the spindle or outside the disk in a safe area, where their abnormal contact with the surface of the disks is excluded.

Fig.1. HDD

Also, unlike floppy disk, the storage medium is combined with a storage device, a drive and an electronics unit and (in personal computers in most cases) is usually installed inside the computer system unit.

Manufacturers

Most hard drives make certain sounds before they malfunction, but these sounds will vary between hard drives from different brands. Restoration company Data Cent has created a database of sounds that will help you determine what's wrong with your hard drive. And if you hear that your hard drive is making strange noises, then perhaps its life is coming to an end and you will have to think about backing up your data.

With this set of sounds, you may be able to diagnose the operation of the hard drive and anticipate its possible failure to save all the information you need. The main brands of hard drives for which Data Cent recorded sounds of various failures are Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, as well as several other brands.

All hard drives eventually fail. In this case, you may hear various strange sounds, but in most cases, no. Some failures may be partial or temporary and due to the fact that some bits in the exchange of information with the OS have not yet been updated. IME is one of the most common causes of errors Windows boot, not a physical HDD failure. But for some reason most people buy a new hard drive.

There are many programs for diagnosing both the surface of the hard drive, its heads, and the electronics itself. Also, these programs can read SMART statistics from your hard drive and determine how many failures were observed during work hard and thereby predict its condition (in some cases it is possible to predict its service life).

The most reliable storage method important information- simultaneously on several media ( backup). If one media fails and you have backup copy important data, then you are not afraid of any hardware failures.

external HDs

Rice. 2 External hard drive

Hard drives became external relatively recently. For about ten years, hard drives have existed in the form of external devices for data storage. The first devices were not in any demand, so they practically did not reach the regions of our country. This was due to the use of a rather slow data port - a parallel interface, which, among other things, did not support Plug&Play operating mode. The first such devices had a rather “scary” appearance and were bulky, since manufacturers tried to use cheaper 3.5-inch hard drives as their basis. Not all devices worked stably with all types of equipment; much depended on the “quality factor” of the driver supplied with the device.

Today, external hard drives are a mass product that almost every user has. External hard drives are used both for storing valuable data and for transferring information between computers. Global distribution of USB ports in car radios, portable players, multimedia stations have significantly expanded the scope of application external hard disks.

Modern external hard drives are most often based on 2.5-inch devices and have various controller variations that support one USB 2.0 port or support modern e-SATA/USB 3.0 ports. Each user can decide for himself which set of ports he needs in each specific case. The most popular devices are those with a USB 2.0 port. Previously, we tested the WD My Book external hard drive with support for a USB 3.0 port. This device did not claim the title mobile device and was more consistent with the concept of an external desktop product.

In today's review we will present to your attention an external hard drive Western drive Digital My Passport Essential 500 GB, which has a USB 2.0 port controller, which is found on almost every computer released in the last decade.

Western Digital has solid experience in producing external hard drives. The history of the release of My Passport external hard drives dates back almost to the creation of Western Digital Scorpio mobile hard drives. Under the plastic cases of the first models were hidden hard drives with IDE interfaces, which today are outdated and obsolete solutions, so all new devices are equipped with 2.5 Western Digital Scorpio hard drives with SATA interface. Under plastic case Modern external hard drives hide either an IDE(PATA)-USB 2.0 or a SATA-USB 2.0 controller, which is a bridge between these two data transfer standards.

Along with the growth in the volume of mobile hard drives, the volume of My Passport external hard drives is also growing. The first external hard drives had a maximum capacity of 80 GB, and today’s review includes a device with a capacity of 500 GB. The maximum capacity of devices in this WD series is 640 GB - this is a figure that we could not even dream of in the segment of external 2.5-inch drives a couple of years ago.

1. ANALYTICAL PART

1.1 Purpose of the device or instrument

Hard drive, otherwise hard drive or hdd (HardDiskDrive) is an accessory for permanent storage of information. Unlike random access memory, information is stored on it even in power-off mode. The purpose of a hard drive is to store and reproduce this information.

Modern hard drives are characterized by the following parameters:

volume (the more, the better), as a rule, is measured in Gigabytes, although a transition to Terabytes is expected in the near future;

rotation speed (measured in number per second), average value is 7200. Maximum hdds reach rotation speeds of more than 15,000 revolutions per minute.

Depending on their purpose, hard drives can be conventional (designed for stationary operation in system units or laptops) and removable (for transferring and copying large amounts of information). The purpose of a removable hard drive is the same as a flash drive, but it can also be used as a stationary one, including a system one.

1.2 Technical specifications

The main characteristics of a hard drive are capacity and performance.

Interface - a set of communication lines, signals sent along these lines, technical means, supporting these lines, and the rules (protocol) of exchange. Modern mass-produced internal hard disks can use ATA (aka IDE and PATA), SATA, eSATA, SCSI, SAS, FireWire, SDIO and FibreChannel interfaces.

Capacity is the amount of data that can be stored by the drive. Since the creation of the first hard drives, as a result of continuous improvements in data recording technology, their maximum possible capacity has been continuously increasing. The capacity of modern hard drives (with a 3.5-inch form factor) is

September 2011 reaches 4000 GB (4 Terabytes) and is approaching 5 TB. In contrast to the system of prefixes adopted in computer science, denoting a value that is a multiple of 1024 (see: binary prefixes), when designating the capacity of hard drives, manufacturers use values ​​that are multiples of 1000. Thus, the capacity is hard

What is the most important “body part” of a computer? CPU, video card or maybe motherboard? The answer to this question will be given by anyone who has ever had a hard drive fail. No one will die because of a burned-out processor - they will simply buy a new one. But you can’t get information back from a broken hard drive (unless, of course, you followed the advice we gave in the article “Greetings from the Other World” in the last issue of “Gaming”). Therefore, today we will look at secondary (you understand, timely backup is a priority task) utilities for maintaining the hard drive and monitoring its health.

Is everything sterile?

DriveSitter. Critical values ​​of the S.M.A.R.T. parameters are marked in red.

What does it take for a propeller to live a long and happy life? First of all, it is necessary to monitor the cleanliness (both literally and figuratively) of the hard drive. Programs that wipe the disk with a cloth have not yet been invented, but there are plenty of garbage file cleaners.

WinTools.net It does a better job of cleaning up disks than anyone else. The program is already configured to remove the maximum possible amount of garbage, but if you wish, you can add your own filters. Erasing found files is safe for the system (WinTools.net skips important logs, for example, installers and uninstallers), but it is still better to carefully review the list so as not to lose anything valuable.

The remaining utility modules have almost nothing to do with disk utilities, but we will briefly talk about them. The Add/Remove Programs module deals with... installing and uninstalling programs (who would have thought?). Before and after installation, a snapshot of the system is taken so that later you can completely remove unnecessary software. There is also a registry cleaner, startup manager, tweaker, and security customizer.

The next point is a very important hygienic procedure - defragmentation. Almost everyone has probably heard this word, but not everyone understands its meaning. Let's explain now. While the computer is running, something is constantly being written to the hard drive, from changes in the registry to regular files and folders. As a result, it may happen that the file will be recorded in different parts of the disk, that is, the beginning is in one place, the middle is in another, and the ending is in a third. And just imagine how the reading goes: the magnetic head of the screw finds the first part, then rushes at full speed to the second, then to the third... What if there are 10 or 20 such fragments? Reading speed drops noticeably. When defragmenting, the disk is optimized in such a way that all parts of one file are located in order, in adjacent sectors. Thus, the load on the mechanical part of the hard drive decreases and productivity increases.

Windows has a built-in defragmenter, but it works so slowly that it sometimes takes more than ten hours to complete a full cycle. However, it does not have any additional features, so it is better to use well-proven third-party utilities.

Our first such program will be O&O Defrag V8. It's much faster than standard Windows defragmenter, besides, it has several operating modes to choose from. Stealth mode is suitable for everyday needs - it hardly loads the system. Space mode is designed for fast processing of highly fragmented disks. The remaining three modes completely defragment the selected disk and sort files according to their name, date or frequency of access. The latter option is especially useful because frequently used files are best placed at the beginning of the disk, where the reading speed is maximum.

Another one additional opportunity O&O Defrag V8 - scheduler. With it, you can configure the program to regularly defragment disks. In this case, you can forget about the full (and rather long) defragmentation process.

Another popular utility is called PerfectDisk. It is not much different from O&O Defrag V8: it works at approximately the same speed, skillfully locates frequently used files on the disk and has its own scheduler. The only differences are in the interface, so the choice has to be made solely for aesthetic reasons.

Having finished cleaning the disk, let's see how its health is. DriveSitter monitors the temperature and parameters of the hard drive and, if critical values ​​are exceeded, sends sound signal or sends an e-mail to the specified mailbox.

HD Tune- a slightly more functional utility than the previous one. In addition to the attributes of S.M.A.R.T. and temperature, it can check the disk surface for bad sectors and run the hard drive through a series of tests to determine its speed characteristics. Test results are displayed in real time as a graph. During these operations, the data transfer rate, average seek time and CPU load are checked.

Very original SequoiaView. This program visually shows how much space files take up on a selected disk or directory. Files are displayed as rectangles, the size of which depends on the file size. When you hover your mouse over any rectangle, the Additional Information about the file.

About the program Unlocker Much has already been said, including in our magazine. But we decided to post it one more time (and from now on place it in the “Gaming Standard” section), because the utility is very, very useful: with its help you can delete any files blocked by the operating system.

If the screw is on its last legs, it will help you TestDisk - free utility, which repairs damaged disk partitions. In addition, it fixes the boot sector of the disk. Sometimes TestDisk is the only chance to bring the hard drive back to life and save important data. On our DVD you will find two versions of the program: the first runs under DOS (useful if the computer does not boot at all), the second runs in latest versions Windows.

* * *

Well, when none of the above helps, there is always a method that has been proven over the years - Hard Disk Low Level Format Tool. The name speaks for itself: the program is designed for low-level formatting of a hard drive. With this formatting it is completely rewritten file system, and not a single bit of information will remain on the disk. This utility will be useful when reinstalling the system - if the computer was infected with viruses that antiviruses could not eradicate, you can use the HD Low Level Format Tool. Not a single “worm” can withstand its onslaught.