Causes of hard disk drive data loss
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Part One
Introduction
The last 20 years has brought about a proliferation of computer use
in society. Technology is in a constant state of evolution and computer
based activities are becoming increasingly integrated with their users’
lives. A number of years ago, it was unthought-of to conduct activities
such as banking and shopping online. In addition to this, the vast
communication possibilities that are now in existence are making the
world a smaller place as people are using a multitude of messaging
services such as MSN to stay in contact. The benefits of these highly
sophisticated technologies are however, faced by numerous threats.
Computers are, more than ever, susceptible to malicious use in the
form of hackers, viruses and fraudulent activity. One of the reasons
for this is that computers are responsible for storing large amounts
of information. Aside from threats posed by malicious use, computers
also face a number of issues from an architectural perspective. The
vast majority of data stored on a computer is saved on the hard drive
and although improvements are continuously being made in terms of
their size and capacity, hard drives are always vulnerable to a great
deal of stress. In turn, hard drives inevitably have a shelf life
of approximately three years. A study conducted by the accounting
firm McGladrey and Pullen estimates that one out of every 500 data
centres will experience a severe computer disaster this year. As a
result, almost of half those companies will go out of business.
The objective of this essay is to summarise the main
ways in which hard drives can fail, thus incurring a loss of data
or difficulty in accessibility. The essay is structured as follows;
the first section provides a description of the main ways in which
hard drives can fail, along with the effect that this has on the stored
data. This is followed by a description of the methods that can be
conducted in attempt to try and prevent failure as much as possible
and culminating with a brief conclusion and summary of the essay.
Causes of hard disk drive failure
A hard disk drive is a digitally encoded non-volatile storage device
which stores data on rapidly rotating disks with magnetic surfaces
called hard disk platters. The read-write heads of the hard disk are
used to recode and retrieve the data stored on the hard disk as the
disk platter rotates at a very high speed. Hard disks operate under
extreme stress and will eventually fail due to general wear and tear
accrued through age or some form of malfunction or failure. The chances
of failure of a hard drive therefore increase greatly over time and
ironically the chances are greatly increased as hard disks improve
and develop. The phenomenon of hard disk failure is raising higher
and higher; as to increase the read and write speed, today we have
the latest hard disk rotating at 15,000 rpm. This generates massive
centrifugal force, a single adverse cause in the course of normal
operation can cause severe hard disk failure.
Hard disk failures can be generally classified in two
categories. The first category is where there is something physically
wrong with the hard drive itself, the second is where there is nothing
physically wrong with the drive itself but for one reason or another
the information stored on the hard disk has become corrupted.
The following section outlines the main causes of hard
drive failure which are as follows:
