Tips on How to Keep Your Hard Drive in Good Form

As with all things in life, those that cost less tend to be taken for granted. Indeed, why spend countless days in maintaining something that can easily be bought by a day’s wage?

Hard drives are fast spinning out of the PC users’ orbit of attention. As of this month, a terabyte (yes, we’re already past the gigabyte era) of storage costs around $100, and it’s expected to slide further. That’s extremely cheap, considering that about a decade ago, a gigabyte of the said accessory would’ve easily out-priced its principal.

Just because a hard disk could easily or cheaply be bought like an ordinary item in a 7-Eleven store doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t give much attention to it. While the peripheral itself can be replaced anytime at one’s whim, the contents thereof aren’t exactly disposable. For the prudent and the wise, a hard drive is like a gold mine or a vault; its contents are undeniably precious.

So before you eventually blow up your mine by your continuous inaction and lack of care, I suggest that you take into heart (and into action!) the following tips:

1.  Kick Out Idle Files

If you’re going to take a long and careful look at the contents of your hard drive, you’ll discover that about a third of it is either unused or unwanted. You may contend, though, that that shouldn’t be a problem since there’s lot of bytes to spare. However, space isn’t the problem in stuffed disks.

PC speed and performance dips when the disks are spinning with a full load. The more data that the drive carries, the longer it takes for it to locate and load a particular file. You should therefore do a little spring cleaning inside your hard drive from time to time, preferably at least once a month. Delete files or applications that you no longer need. If you’ve installed a new version of a program, make sure that you delete the old one. If you’re testing demo versions of programs that you mindlessly download over the Internet, make it a point to uninstall them if you later realize that it doesn’t suit your needs.

2.  Run Check Disk

If you haven’t experienced a sudden shut down or a system crash, then you probably haven’t seen this program in action yet. Check Disk is a Windows utility that scans hard disks for bad sectors caused by damaged platters. It marks unusable portions of the drive so that no data would be written on them.

While Check Disk runs automatically after every crash, you should make it a point to run it manually from time to time, especially if you’re disks seem to be making unusual noises whenever it is retrieving data or running applications.

3.  Don’t Ignore Disk Cleanup

Some users confuse Disk Cleanup with Check Disk. While both Windows utilities care for your hard drive, they do so in different ways. The latter examines the physical integrity of the peripheral, while the former checks its contents. Disk Cleanup scans for files that are no longer needed or should’ve already been deleted along with the program that it was associated with. You would be surprised at the amount of disk place that could be freed up after the cleanup.