In these technology driven times, we don’t often stop to think about the “how”. Everything is available to us at the touch of a button or the flick of a switch. Take your computer hard drive for instance. The storage power behind our laptops, computers, DVR recorders, game consoles etc. We click our mouse or remote and within seconds the image, file or programme we want to access is there on our screen.
How fragile is your portable hard drive?
The second you click your mouse button, the read write heads on your hard drive, themselves no wider than 0.3mm, hovering on an air cushion 1 millionth of a millimetre above the platter surfaces, whilst spinning at up to 15,000 rotations per minute, will locate and compile exactly the piece of information you need and this happens in literally milliseconds. Pretty amazing isn’t it? The trouble is, these awesome storage devices are so fragile that they don’t much like being knocked, bumped or heaven forbid – dropped. It doesn’t even need to be from a great height, either. We’ve seen all extremes here, from slipping off a sofa and swinging by their USB cord like a pendulum, right through to being placed on a car roof, forgotten about, falling off and then run over by a following vehicle. External hard drives seem to have the very worst times!
How you should use a portable hard drive
The ideal set up and instruction for a portable hard drive is for it to be a “mirror” of your main computer or ‘off-line’ storage. When you upload your new batch of holiday pictures to your computer, synchronise your portable hard drive then put it safely away again. Make it a habit to back things up on either a weekly basis or whenever you place a substantial amount of new data on your PC. [Tip] always copy and never move data from your PC to the external drive and If you really need to take it out on location with you then please treat it very gently. Remember, it’s only considered a ‘back-up’ if you’ve got more than one copy of your data!! Our blog post with Top 5 Tips at keeping your data safe is a handy read...