The average lifespan of a conventional hard drive is from six to eight year, it can work lot more than that or it can wear out way before the average time. But those would be the cases when either the drive experiences some external damage or the manufacturer has made some blunder. Set up a mirrored volume and protect your information!
You might have seen the hard drive of your computer making chirp noises while working; this is expected from a hard drive that has been functional from a long time. A hard drive has so many mechanical parts that something or other has to loosen up in such a long duration of operation.
As the hard drive wears out, it becomes a necessity to secure all the data in it. A very good idea is to setup a mirrored volume of your hard drive or an external storage device. If you have mirrored it in an external hard drive, it is also under threat of corruption or deletion. Although, it is not impossible to perform external hard drive partition recovery to regain your files.
So we are quite sure about the death of hard drive, sooner or later it is coming and you don’t know for sure about the time when it will stop working. But we always have to save the integrity of our work, because it is precious for us. So what are constrains in mirroring your hard drive? Let’s have a look.
Why do Hard Disks Fail?
Your computer’s hard disk drive can fail due to several reasons. Sometimes due to expected reasons and other due to unexpected ones. Here are some of the common failures a hard disk can experience.
- Over Heating – this is one of the most common problems with a hard disk. The HDDs have a heat generation due to mechanical parts whereas SSDs have less heat generation due to static semiconductor. But both of them are quite vulnerable to heat. If mistakenly exposed to heat, they are quite in a threat to get damaged.
- Physical damage – A minute physical damage may cause the damage of your hard drive to a great extent. When SSDs are safer to jerks and small turbulence, the HDDs are quite sensitive, a small jerk to your computer may cause severe damage to your hard drive.
- Sudden Switching – A sudden and frequent switching of computer may cause a large damage to functionality of the hard drive. This is recommended always by the manufacturer. Although it is not a big damage, but frequently switching of the computer would cause the hard drive’s death.
- Surge – A power surge may lead to ultimate death of your hard drive. This is a crucial factor for all of the computers. So maintaining a constant power supply and a very good surge protection scheme is very useful to avoid the failure.
Apart from these issues, some of the common problems occur due to rigorous disk de-fragmentation which may eventually lead to dysfunctional hard disks.
How to Setup a Mirrored Volume
Keeping a mirrored volume of your hard drive is very useful for the protection of all your work and data associated with it. It will help u save a great deal of your efforts at times of crisis. Here are tips to setup a mirrored volume;
- This technique is used to protect data from disk failures, so we suggest using more than one disk to mirror the data from your hard disk. So if one drive fails, the data can be retrieved from another disk in use.
- It is a method to backup the recurring work, so whatever is written in one disk is also written on another or parallel disks.
- It is done using either hardware or software scheme, in hardware, the RAID controllers are used to interface multiple hard drives to the computer and make parallel operation.
Whereas software based mirroring uses applications that can save the data parallel to the hard drive. This is cheaper and more flexible than hardware mirroring.
- Initiate the Mirroring by deciding if you want to make it on your computer hard drive or a separate external hard drive.
- Partition the disk where you want to mirror your hard drive.
- Format the disk partition where you want to perform mirroring.
- Select the drive where you want to mirror from the list of all the partitions and proceed.
- Select the location to save your mirror copy and click proceed to initiate the mirroring.
- After it is over, start the computer and open the new drive to ensure the copied or mirrored files.
Thus, making a mirrored volume can be very helpful for the safety of your data in case your hard drive fails. The life of a hard drive is uncertain, no matter how much precaution we take. The work is precious and data security is paramount for all of us. Let’s try to mirror the hard drive and part ways from the concerns of hard drive failure.
