Hard Drive maintenance and errors

I started this, cuz one old ex friend told me that "his" vista is so super that he never have to maintain his pc, that vista does it automatically for him. what idiot haha
im sure some ppl here know who im talking about. i got 2 old HDDs from him. 160gb and 40gb, both are completel FUCKED with bad sectors, while i have few even older and more used HDDs on my own and they work perfectly fine.

so whats the difference ? that idiot never defragmented and neither did he check the disk for errors and fix them. this is what happens if you dont maintain your HDD.
im trying to fix it, but dont think its fixable no more, since he didnt maintain it for years. it has about 32gb under bad sectors lol .. i remember him proudly saying "my vista is so good that i dont need to run any tools to maintain" and then later he keeps moaning and complaining that his HDDs keep fucking up lol. OFCOURSE THEY DO !
its like if you would drive a car without changing oils, without putting water when its lost ..etc
i dont think you can drive a car more than 1-2 years without doing any maintenance at all. if you drive constantly, then not even 1 year prolly. its same with HDDs.
he even managed to fuck up one SD card on his phone, he sure is master in that.

so what one can do to prevent such things and keep their HDDs running .. well virtually forever.

1. defrag your HDD all the time, depending on how much data you move. if you move a lot of data, defrag once in a week. if you're not much into downloading, gaming ..etc and dont install / uninstall / download ..etc new stuff, then once in month is enough.
always defrag after you do some big cleaning in your pc and move lot of files.
- i suggest using "auslogic disk defrag"

2. use checkdisk to check for errors and fix them. windows default check disk will do, but there are better tools out there to be used. for example "hdd regenerator" also "auslogic disk defrag" has check option, but its very poor quality, didnt even detect bad sectors on my hdd.
easiest, but not best solution is using windows check disk command. im "cmd" type:

Code: Select all

chkdsk E: /R

where E is your drive letter you want to scan. /R will check and correct bad sectors, however you will lose disk space as said. instead of 150gb i have 120gb ... cuz that idiot never fixed his HDDs.

3. depending on your OS, make your OS (operating system) to spin down the hdd when not used for some time. i suggest set that time to something very low for your archive drives that are not used often.

4. make sure your pc is cooled well and hdds wont get too hot. specially when you are on laptop, it is very important to get good cooling (USB cooling pad for example).

5. surge protection for your pc would be a good idea, but even better would be UPS, if you are using laptop, you dont have to worry about this issue.

this is pretty much it, obviously you should never "slap" your pc whenever it starts to make weird sound ..etc and you should never tamper with hardware without turning the power off. a small bump into HDD or HDDs cable may cause it to have bad sectors. specially if you hit the powercable and it "sparks" near the contact, that most likely will cause your hdd to either completely fuck up or in good luck just have some bad sectors that cannot be removed.

so yeah, i dont care what that "smart ass" says, actions speak louder than words