You can tell a lot about a person by looking at how they treat their hard drives. It is deceptively easy to take for granted that every morning when you turn on the power strip your monitor will show you that your computer is ready for work. The hard drive that is home to the operating system that tells your collection of silicon and circuit boards what they are here to do, is usually ignored when it works, but feared and cursed at when it doesn’t. When drives are internal, they are hidden away doing things that most users don’t really care to have spelled out in great detail. Not every car driver needs or wants to be able to strip down their engine, either, as long as they can just turn the key and go. The cases that external drives are mounted in mostly follow the theme of mysterious metal objects built to withstand the perils of deep space travel (even if they are made of plastic, you know it is plastic from the planet Krypton). If it is fanless, it is silent except for occasional sounds that sometimes get used in sci-fi movies to replicate animated conversations in clicks and clatter between aliens or cyborgs. If it needs the fans it has, you just accept the reality that you will probably have to build a soundproof machine room either with or without the liquid nitrogen cooled climate control system, somewhere out of earshot. Words haven’t always worked when I’ve tried to explain to others just why my own personal relationship with hard drives has changed over the years, but I still try. Let’s start with the name. “Hard” drive. Hard drive. One more time —HARD drive. I will grant you that it is easy to understand why it is called that. It is all relative. Floppy disks actually were floppy if you stripped them of their protective shells and shutters. And the actual platters in a hard drive are firmer than a floppy, hence the name. I’m ok with that. Problems arise when the name is taken literally to heart, though. In this case, hard does not imply indestructible, impervious, infallible or any other descriptive modifier that might lead one to believe that drives, like diamonds, are forever. They are truly an enigma. Drives currently available max out at the multi-terabyte size. Some are mounted in shock resistant cases and are backed by reasonable replacement warranties. This is good for the drive but that only covers the drive itself. Your work, however, is exempt from these protections. It is your responsibility to preserve your data or be ready to start again from scratch. Drives work well enough to imbue a comfortable level of trust that should be tempered with a pinch of caution. When I teach others about digital audio systems, I try to instill realistic views of what the available technology can and can’t do along with celebrating the awe that accompanies the quickening speed of developments in the field. I say enigmatic, because digital systems can be misread as being incapable of error until there is one. What I usually say is that a hard drive is an incredible piece of design and engineering which allows computer users immeasurable benefits. What it does, at the speed of operation and the capacities available today is remarkable but the method used to accomplish this is not magic. The inner workings of a drive depend upon precise physical movements and controls that have little tolerance for mistakes. It should be a clue that these devices are assembled in a “clean room” where the fear of a single dust particle is palpable. In my classes, purely verbal explanations don’t hit home for some, so I set out silver surfing the web to see if I could find a visual aid to support my point ——- I found this: As you can tell from this video, hard drives depend on precise integration of mechanical and electronic systems for them to work properly. Think of it this way, the silver platter is spinning at around 100 times per second. Each side of platters like these can contain tens of billions of bits of information stored in a way that only the brains of this system knows how to decode (Can you say “random access?”). The actuator (the moving part that resembles a turntable’s tonearm) has the responsiblity of placing and retrieving these tiny bits at incredible speeds. The heads on the actuator arm are suspended just above the platter at a height that is a lot less than the width of a single hair. Just starting a program can require millions of accesses to the platter. Under these exacting conditions, one occurance of the heads touching the spinning surface can cause major damage to all the parts involved. There is much more to this process than I have space for, so if you want more details about the process, go here. Suffice it to say though, this knowledge should be used to inform your now (if not before) proactive relationship with your hard drive. Most of the ways to protect and preserve both the drive and the data within, are obvious, like working on stable surfaces and not moving the computer when the drive is spinning. There are also utilities which can monitor the physical health of your drive, even allowing you to block out bad areas (sectors) when they are found. With your data, the best way to preserve it is keeping multiple up to date copies of that data. It really is about mindset. My suggestion would be to prepare for the day that you see a big flashing question mark on your screen when you power up for the day. The work it will take to rebuild is as of now, still in your hands. [Special thanks for use of the above video which is published by Joshua Marius, www.letheonline.net]

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