No Comments Written by Robert on July 24, 2008 – 11:39 pm

Putting It in Storage

Modern laptops come equipped with a hard disk drive that holds files, programs, and settings that you create or load to it from other sources. You also usually find one or another form of optical drives with removable storage media.

Another form of removable storage coming into increasing use is flash memory, a form of RAM that doesn’t need electrical power to retain information. And many older laptops also come equipped with a floppy disk drive, although this outdated, slow, and limited device is no longer commonly used.

Hard disks

A hard drive in a laptop is just like a hard drive in a desktop or tower computer except that it’s much smaller, much lighter, and much less demanding of electrical power. It’s also designed to be resistant to damage or problems caused by movement of the machine in which it resides, and the relatively robust case further protects it.

You have a reasonable right to assume that your laptop maker has selected a well-made hard drive; as a matter of fact, only half a dozen or so drive makers exist, and though one may be faster or hold more information than another, they’re all pretty well made. A laptop manufacturer has no reason to install a drive that’s likely to fail within the warranty period.

As a user, you should focus on two facts:

1. Buying a hard drive that’s too small for the sort of work you do is eventually going to cost you more. You’ll either have to one of these two things:

• Replace the original hard drive with a larger one (and deal with all the related headaches of migrating your operating system, applications, and data from old to new).
• Add an external hard drive, which is an easy upgrade but requires a separate source of power and more space in your laptop travel bag.

2. Although modern hard drives are very well made, and may last for many years (longer than you keep your laptop), this mechanical device quite possibly might suddenly stop spinning or otherwise refuse you access to the data stored on it. You should always act as if today is the last day your hard disk drive will respond to your command. Know the three basic rules of storage safety:

• Back up your data.
• Update your backups.
• Back up your updates.

There are all sorts of automated backup systems, including tape drives and network storage. But most users need only to remember to store their essential data files in at least two places. In my system, when I am on the road, I burn a CD or make copies on a flash memory key every day. When I’m in my office, I make copies of live files from my laptop across an Ethernet to a hard drive in one of my desktop machines.

If you make backups every other day, the worst that can happen is losing a day or two’s worth of work. With CD-Rs costing somewhere between ten cents and a quarter, they’re the cheapest form of insurance you can get for your data (and for your money). Many hard disk drives die a silent death. One day they’re working properly and the next they’re as dead as an expensive doorknob. If you’re lucky, you get some advance warning:

1. Screeching or grinding sound from the drive
2. Recurring garbling of part or all of a file
3. An occasional hiccup where the drive won’t come to life when you first apply power but comes back on a reboot
4. An intermittent warning from the operating system or the BIOS that it cannot communicate with the drive
5. A specific alarm from a disk-monitoring software utility
6. A steady (or irregular) increase in the number of bad blocks discovered by a system utility program.

I’m always on the lookout for these signs, but I don’t lose sleep over them - that is, unless I realize I’ve forgotten to make backups recently.