Storage may be relatively cheap these days, but there’s a lot more than just money at stake when a hard drive containing valuable data crashes. A few simple precautions can make that sort of disaster less likely, says Jack Wallen.

Hardware costs have dropped considerably over the past decade, but those price falls don’t mean we shouldn’t take care of our kit — and that is especially true for hard drives. Storage is a precious commodity because it holds the data that employees use to do their jobs.

Of course, all drives fail eventually but a few simple steps can prevent their premature demise. Here are my 10 suggestions for prolonging storage life.

1. Run chkdsk

All hard disks eventually contain errors. These errors can include physical problems, software issues and partition-table issues. The Windows chkdsk program will attempt to handle any problems, such as bad sectors, lost clusters, cross-linked files and directory errors. Such errors can quickly lead to an unbootable drive, which will lead to downtime for the end user.

The best way I have found to take advantage of chkdsk is to have it run at the next boot with the command:

chkdsk X: /f

where X is the drive you want to check. This command will inform you that the disk is locked and will ask you if you want to run chkdsk the next time the system restarts. Select Y to allow this action.

2. Add a monitor

Plenty of applications are available to monitor the health of your drives, offering a host of features. One of the best choices is the Acronis Drive Monitor, a free tool that will monitor everything from hard-drive temperature to the percentage of free space available. Acronis Drive Monitor can be set up to send out email alerts if something is amiss on the drive being monitored. Getting these alerts is a simple way to take the initiative in the fight against drive failure.

3. Separate operating system install from user data

With the Linux operating system, I almost always put the user’s home directories and the operating system installation on separate drives. This measure ensures the drive containing the operating system undergoes less reading and writing and that much of the I/O will happen on the user’s home drive. It is a precaution that will extend the life of the operating system’s drive, as well as allowing you to transfer the user data easily should the operating system drive fail.

4. Be careful about the surrounding environment

This point may seem obvious but every day I see PCs stuck in tiny cabinets with zero air circulation. Those machines always run hot, which will shorten the lifespan of the internal components. So instead of locating machines in tight, unventilated spaces, give them plenty of breathing room.

If you must cram a machine into a tight space, at least give it ventilation and even add a fan to pull out the stale, warm air generated by the PC. There’s a reason why so much time and money have gone into PC cooling and why we have technologies such as liquid cooling in datacentres.

5. Watch out for static

This is another obvious point for those with some experience, but it’s worth repeating that static electricity is the enemy of computer components. When you handle them, make sure you ground yourself first. This precaution is especially true in the winter months or in areas of drier air. If you seem to pick up static shocks almost every time you touch something, that’s a sign that you should use extra caution when handling drives.

You should also be careful about where you set down drives. I have witnessed users placing drives on stereo speakers, TVs and other appliances or devices that can give off an electromagnetic wave. Most of these appliances have magnets that are not strong enough to erase a drive — but you still shouldn’t risk it.

6. Defragment that drive

A fragmented drive has to work harder than it should. All hard drives should be used in their most efficient states to avoid excess wear and tear. To be on the safe side…… set your PC or PCs to defrag automatically every week. This measure extends the life of your drive by keeping the file structure compact, so the read heads are not moving as much or as often.

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7. Use a solid-state drive

Solid-state drives are, for all intents and purposes, just large flash drives, so they have no moving parts. Without moving parts, the life of the drive as a whole is naturally going to be longer than it would if the drive included read heads, platters and bearings. Although these drives cost more, they will save you money in the long run by offering a longer lifespan, which means less likelihood of drive failure causing downtime as data is recovered and transferred.

8. Take advantage of power save

On nearly every operating system, you can configure your hard drive to spin down after a given time. In some older iterations of operating systems, drives would spin 24/7 — which would drastically reduce their life. By default, Windows 7 uses the Balanced Power Savings plan, which will turn off the hard drive after 20 minutes of inactivity. Even if you change that by a few minutes, you are adding life to your hard drive.

Just make sure you don’t reduce that number to the point where your drive is going to sleep frequently throughout the day. If you are prone to taking five- to 10-minute breaks, consider lowering that time to no less than 15 minutes. When the drive goes to sleep, the drive is not spinning. So such a change could have a significant bearing on the drive’s lifespan.

9. Tighten those screws

Loose mounting screws that secure the hard drive to the PC chassis can cause excessive vibrations. Those vibrations can damage the platters of a standard hard disk. If you hear vibrations coming from inside your PC, it needs checking to ensure the screws securing the drive to the mounting platform are tight.

10. Back up

Eventually, drives will fail. No matter how careful you are, no matter how many steps you take to prevent failure, the drive will — in the end — die. If you have solid backups, at least the transition from one drive to another will be painless. And by using a backup tool such as Acronis Universal Restore, you can transfer a machine image from one piece of hardware to another with little difficulty.