The design of hard drives , although basically the same concept implemented 31 years ago in the original xt ibm microcomputer (and barrel sized 5 megabyte drives in ibm mainframes before that), have undergone drastic changes to increase speed and capacity over time. The first microcomputer drives having 40 megabyte capacities where now 2 terabytes and larger are becoming common and inexpensive. The idea of a fast spinning magnetic disk with a floating head reading and writing was a quantum leap forward from floppy disk and tape used previous – both in speed and capacity. Without the hard disk the multimedia and graphical interface properties we enjoy today would simply not be possible. Likely the computer revolution would not have happened and so many things would be different. The fact we are still using the same technology 20 years later speaks to what an incredible design the hard drive is. 
So what is the bad news? Hard drives can fail. All drives are sold with a “mean time between failure” rating in hours (ie 100,000)from the manufacturers. So they certainly acknowledge the possibility. The reality is a drive may fail early in its life (called infancy failure), later in life or never untill eventually it’s recycled. When you realize the construction of the drive includes a head floating less than a hair width above a platter spinning at 7200rpm on a spindle that sits on a tiny bearing – you can see how this could fail. Preparation for failure is key because if the drive fails it can mean catastrophic data loss. There are data recovery methods that can recover data from a failing or totally failed drive and they vary in cost from a few hundred to thousands of dollars, depending on what work is required and how the drive has failed. By preparation for failure we mean a good backup plan. This used to be only for servers but now even home users with priceless photos, purchased music and school projects should be prepared by doing regular backups. The types of backup include usb hard drives, usb keys, on line backup services and many others. Even Windows 7 includes a very good backup program. Back to the good news... SSD or solid state drives are slowly taking over the hard drive market and because they have no moving parts they are far less prone to failure. They currently have a high cost per megabyte compared to conventional drives- and there are some compatibility issues- but they are the logical heir apparent to the hard drive empire. Solid state memory being used in mp3 players, ipods, tablets and phones are helping price go down and capacity come up to the point where solid state drives can only succeed eventually. Backup will always be needed because of issues of theft and disaster, but the primary need will soon not be guarding against hard drive failure, Good news indeed for most users.
Click here for Part 1: The Motherboard
Click here for Part 2: The CPU
Click here for Part 4: RAM
-Paul C, Service Bench Supervisor
Northern Computer - Your Trusted Partner
#1 - 495 Banks Road Kelowna, BC V1X 6A2
Phone: 250.762.7753 Fax: 250.861.1861 Toll-Free: 1.877.257.2896
Email: sales@northerncomputer.ca or service@northerncomputer.ca
Web: http://www.northerncomputer.ca
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