Helping you to get the most out of your computer, below are tips which are expanded upon from our newsletter. To be added to our mailing list of handy tips, please send an email to mail@vantageit.co.uk
Unless you use a palmtop or hand-held device, your computer stores its programs and data on a hard drive. This consists of a small number of disks (or platters), each with its own read/write head.
It operates very much like a record player, albeit much more quickly. The hard drive knows where each piece of data is held on each platter and moves the head to the right position in order to read from (or write to) the platter as it passes the head. It's amazing how these things do the same task every time you start your computer, start a program or save data and they get it right every time (almost).
The platters spin constantly (at between 4200 and 15000 RPM, depending on the drive), with the head held a fraction of a millimetre from the platter's surface. Any sudden jolt or vibration can cause the head and platter to come into contact with each other. When this happens, data is lost. If the shock is particularly strong, the drive may never work again. If you use a laptop, you'll see from the video why it's always best to avoid sudden jolts while it is working (even though laptop drives are designed to be resilient to some movement).
It is not just vibration that can cause problems - the hard drive is mechanical and (apart from fans) is the only moving part in a PC or server. It is therefore prone to failure more than any other component. It is for these reasons that servers or mission critical machines should always have hard drive fault tolerance (in the form of multiple disks) built in - which is what Vantage IT will always specify. When more than one hard drive is used together to store data, the system is called RAID. If you haven't got RAID or are unsure, please contact us so we can give you some peace of mind, or recommend a solution.
To see a hard drive in operation, please click here. Don't be put off by the technical terms at the beginning - seeing the drive work is the interesting bit (the video will open in a new window).
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