Written by I guess we have all been there at one stage or another. You have been working on an important project, business proposal or even spent days and sometimes weeks writing an academic paper and all of a sudden the file is no longer there and panic sets in.
The first thing to do is to do a search of your folders to make sure you have not saved it in the incorrect folder and if this does not fine the elusive file you can also try having a look in the recycle bin to make sure you have not accidently deleted it. If the file can still not be found then this may be indicative that you are suffering from a degraded drive.
Much as we would like to believe a hard drive will not last forever but has a definitive life expectancy which is often referred to as a mean time between failures (MTB). MTB can often be used as a reference to a drive future reliability and calculations would put expected drive failures at less than 0.1 percent.
Unfortunately life isn’t always that straight forward!
So the big question is when is the best time to renew my hard drive so it does not suffer from any failures?
This is one of those wide open questions that will have experts arguing until the cows come home because there are a wide variety of factors that come into play.
The actual usage of the hard disk will play a large part in your decision for example a hard drive used in a low use machine may last 5 years or longer as the drive is not being used very much at all or only stores a relatively small amount of data.
Pretty much the same could be said for a mid usage machine as well for example a pc used for office work or accounts perhaps. So you may never experience drive degradation or drive failure.
But for power users it is an entirely different story. Extreme gamers and users of high end commercial applications will be driving their systems very hard indeed and the amount of data that is shifted into swap files or written back to the disk is huge so its only reasonable to expect disk life to be shorter and the chances of drive failure or disk degradation to be far higher.
To combat the increased risk of failure and to protect essential data well informed IT departments will make sure that the machines are renewed far more often than office PC’s in this scenario. Another consideration for this is also business productivity for example shorter design time or time to market.
If a hard working drive’s life were to be extended then it would be reasonable to see an increasing ramp up in disk failures over time or drive degradation.
During challenging economic times, business computer refresh programs are often put of to protect working capital which on the face of it can be seen as a sound business decision but there can be a large bite to this policy if an essential drive or server fails with a resultant loss of business critical data.
Any business should in this day and age have effective online server backup and disaster recovery policies in place especially if postponing a business system upgrade.
Other factors affecting hard disk lifespan are the environment the computer is running in and basic system maintenance for example a poorly maintained Pc can become literally clogged with dust and get very hot. Heat is a major factor of drive failure as is hard disk fragmentation, so proper system maintenance is conducive to reliable disk performance.
You should be able to recover a deleted file or a lost file provided you have not overwritten the sector with additional data, so if the file is really important try not to write anything else to the drive, and avoid the temptation to use data recovery software for important files.
Most data recovery experts will be able to restore your deleted or lost files even if your drive has degraded and even if your drive has bad sectors that are unreadable data recovery and file recovery are often very successful.
