The end of the hard disk drive
By Charles Miller

Someone recently asked me what new innovation I was hoping for next in the computer world. Without hesitation I responded “a solid-state storage medium for the PC.” In truth, this is not really an innovation in technology as much as the hope that the manufacturing process might soon enable the existing technologies to achieve mass-production affordability.

The Achilles heel of all modern PCs is reliance on the mechanical hard disk as the storage medium. The hard disk with its moving parts is the most common point of failure today. The technology to create a reliable storage medium without moving parts already exists, but is expensive. Perhaps someday it will be economically viable to put this in an average PC, but for three decades now the price of the old mechanical hard disk has always been lower than the solid-state alternatives.

As reliable as hard drives have become, they still have a finite lifespan. While regular backups will help prevent data loss when a hard disk drive fails, hardly anyone takes the time to do this. Please note that I said “when” a hard disk fails, and not “if.”

Knowing as we do that a hard disk failure is out there in our futures, it is better to catch the problem early and replace the hard disk drive. This can save you a significant amount of cash over the cost of trying to recover important data from a crashed disk. Ironically, improvements in hard drive technology have resulted in some of the old reliable symptoms of impending failure to disappear.

Then as now, even brand-new hard drives had some errors. It used to be with old MFM and RLL drive designs that increasing frequency of intermittent read/write failures foretold a hard disk drive going bad. Modern IDE and SATA controllers are able to self-correct and mask these errors right up to the point a catastrophic failure occurs.

Likewise, modern hard disk drives are virtually silent, which eliminates the changes in sound that used to alert owners that something was changing and possibly the drive was going bad. IT professionals like me used to have nicknames such as “Singer,” “Whiner,” “Grinder,” and “Thumper” for our drives (names descriptive of their sounds—the latter needed a gentle thump to get started).

In spite of these indicators being occluded today, your hard disk can still give some warning it is about to fail. A good indicator is the hard drive LED that stays on too much. This indicator is supposed to come on when there is computer activity, but if it comes on and stays on constantly, something is very wrong and is probably going to get worse.

A computer could take a long time to boot up because you have a lot of junk programs loaded on a healthy hard disk. It could also be an indication of a not-so-healthy hard disk trying to compensate for intermittent read/write failures.

Microsoft includes a diagnostic named CHKDSK to detect and fix bad sectors on a disk. The rules for using this program have changed, though. Bad sectors used to be a fact of life and were always found on even new disks. This is no longer true and any bad sectors showing up with CHKDSK today warn of imminent failure.

Another predictor of hard drive failure is running unusually hot. All drives get warm, but if the hard drive itself is too hot for you to comfortably hold your finger on it for thirty seconds, its failure is probably not long off.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-101-8528 or email FAQ7@SMAguru.com.