Programs for maintaining hard drives. Preventative maintenance of hard drives Maintenance and repair of hdd hard drives

In order for your computer to work stably and reliably, you need to periodically clean it. HDD from unnecessary data, and also defragment it.

The Start command => All Programs => Accessories => System Tools => Disk Cleanup opens a window that presents a mode for cleaning local disks from outdated, unused and unnecessary files.

Defragmenting a hard drive

Using the Start command => All Programs => Accessories => System Tools => Disk Defragmenter, a program is launched that is designed to defragment the local disks of the computer, which allows you to optimize the system and increase its performance.

Meaning of this action in the next one. In the process of deleting unnecessary files and folders, free “spaces” are created in different places hard drive. New documents and directories are written to these free places hard drive, thus they are fragmented, that is, divided into fragments and stored in different places on the hard drive. As a result, access to specific files slows down, which ultimately negatively affects system performance. After defragmenting the hard drive, such files and folders are combined (that is, their fragments are located in adjacent sectors of hard disk). In other words, defragmentation allows you to organize the location of files and folders stored on your hard drive, speeding up access to them.

Note
Before defragmenting your hard drive, it is recommended that you clean it. A description of this mode is given in the article.

When you run the Disk Defragmenter command, a defragmentation program window opens.

This window provides a list of all partitions on the computer's hard drive. The corresponding columns for each disk display its name, date and time of the last defragmentation, as well as information about the percentage of fragmentation. Before defragmentation, it is recommended to analyze the state of the current disk to determine whether this action is appropriate. To do this, select the corresponding disk in the list with the mouse pointer and click the Analyze disk button. After analysis, information about what percentage of disk space is fragmented will be displayed in parentheses. The photo shows that 0% of the space on local disks is fragmented, therefore, there is no need for defragmentation.

Cleaning your keyboard and mouse

Cleaning connector contacts

Installing the chips in their places

Cleaning

System backup

Active Preventative Maintenance Techniques

One of the main stages of preventive maintenance is system backup. This operation allows you to restore system functionality in the event of a fatal hardware failure. For Reserve copy you need to purchase a high-capacity storage device.

One of the most important elements of preventative maintenance is regular and thorough cleanings. Dust settling inside a computer can cause many problems.

Firstly, it is a heat insulator, which impairs the cooling of the system.

Secondly, dust necessarily contains conductive particles, which can lead to leaks and even short circuits between electrical circuits.

Finally, certain substances contained in dust can accelerate the oxidation process of contacts, which will ultimately lead to electrical connections.

During preventative maintenance, it is very important to eliminate the effects of thermal displacement of microcircuits. Since the computer heats up and cools down when turned on and off (hence, its components expand and contract), the chips installed in the sockets gradually “crawl out” of them. Therefore, you will have to find all the components installed in the sockets and put them in place.

It is necessary to wipe the connector contacts so that the connections between the nodes and components of the system are reliable. You should pay attention to the expansion connectors, power supply, keyboard and speaker connections located on system board. As for the adapter boards, they need to wipe the printed connectors inserted into the slots on the system board and all other connectors (for example, those installed on the external panel of the adapter).

The keyboard and mouse seem designed to suck in dust and dirt. If you ever open up an old keyboard, you will be amazed at its resemblance to a trash can.

Therefore, I advise you to periodically clean your keyboard with a vacuum cleaner.

To ensure data security and improve efficiency work hard disk, it is necessary to perform some maintenance procedures from time to time. There are also several simple programs, with the help of which you can, to some extent, insure yourself against data loss. These programs create backups(and, if necessary, restore them) those critical areas of the hard drive, if damaged, access to files becomes impossible.

So that the hard drive (HDD) lasts a long time and makes you happy high speed work and does not fail at one point, putting an end to all the information that was recorded on it - it needs to be given attention and periodically maintained. In today's article we will give some tips, if followed, you can extend the life of the HDD by a couple of years.

​Proper installation.

At the dawn of appearance personal computers, as we know them now, hard disks could function exclusively in a horizontal position, this was due to the presence of ball bearings in them. In the early 2000s, hard drives were manufactured using hydrodynamic bearings and could operate in any position. At the same time, it still wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye on correct location HDD and especially reliable fastening in the case.

Reliable fastening.

Many system units provide installing hard disk onto special slides or pins. Despite the fact that this is quite convenient, we still recommend mounting the HDD with bolts. This measure will reduce vibration and therefore preserve the resource of the hard drive.

​We monitor the temperature.

Critical operating temperature for hard drives 55-60 degrees Celsius and above. If these values ​​are exceeded, a catastrophic reduction in the overall service life occurs. To determine the HDD temperature, just install the program: Speed ​​Fan, Everest, Aida, etc. When the temperature of the hard drive exceeds the recommended values, you need to think about measures to reduce it. When system unit, you need to install hard drives through one bay and place a fan on the front panel. With a laptop, unfortunately, everything is not so simple due to its compact body - in this case, the temperature will have to be reduced by better cooling of other components ( central processor, graphics card and northbridge). To do this, it will be enough to carry out scheduled maintenance to clean the cooling system from dust, replace thermal paste and thermal pads.

We avoid physical influences.

From time to time, unexpected problems occur with external HDDs and laptop hard drives, resulting in a device failure in which it is impossible to recover information. The fact is that the class of devices as HDD implies their stationary state during operation, which is not always the case in practice. The fact is that the read head is located at a microscopic distance from the surface of the disk and any vibration or unexpected impact can result in damage to the surface or the read head itself. Considering that many carry a laptop turned on, and there is no need to talk about external HDDs - this problem is very topical. Therefore, we recommend that you turn off your laptop before moving it and be very careful when handling external HDDs.

Useful articles:

Basic operations that sometimes need to be performed with hard drives:

Partitioning. Several operating systems can be installed on a hard drive at the same time. To do this, the hard drive must be partitioned, i.e. independent areas on the disk, each of which can have its own file system. The simplest and most traditionally used program for these purposes in Windows is the program FDisk. Windows 2000, XP, Vista OS have a built-in program for partitioning hard drives.

Formatting. It is divided into low-level (physical), which is performed by manufacturers and divides the surfaces of magnetic plates into tracks and sectors, and high-level (logical), which consists of dividing into clusters and placing them on disk file system. Logical formatting is performed by a standard Windows OS program Format (Formatting disks).

Checking the disk for logical and physical errors. If somehow the correspondence between what is written in the boot area of ​​the disk and what is actually on the disk is broken, the consequences can be unpredictable. This may occur due to failures of the OS and other software. In particular, there is a high probability of errors occurring when the computer shuts down incorrectly, when the system freezes, etc. It will help to detect problems that have arisen and prevent troubles. standard program Windows Check disk or ScanDisk. But this program is not powerful and functional enough. Therefore, for serious problems, it is necessary to use more powerful tools (for example, Norton Disk Doctor(NDD) from Symantec's Norton Utilities package).

Defragmentation. As you know, in terms of performance, the hard drive is one of the weakest points of the system. Each file on the disk takes up a certain amount of space. This space is divided into blocks - clusters. Each cluster belongs to a specific file. It’s good if clusters of the same file follow in a row, but this is not always the case. Files on the disk are constantly being created and destroyed. operating system cannot always allocate space to a file in such a way that its clusters follow each other. That is, a file can occupy several clusters scattered across different disk locations. In this case the file is said to be fragmented. At the same time, the speed of reading and writing the file slows down noticeably. If a lot of such files are formed on the disk, then the speed of the system drops noticeably. To solve this problem, the standard Windows program Disk Defragmenter or Defrag. Again, we can recommend using more powerful tool defragmentation (for example, Norton Speed ​​Disk from Norton Utilities).

Disk Cleanup. When you regularly work on your computer, some user and system “garbage” sometimes accumulates, which is useful to periodically clear and eliminate. There are many different programs for this, and in Windows there is a utility - Disk Cleanup.

In this window, select the required disk from the drop-down list and click OK - the cleaning program will begin scanning the selected disk to see how much space can be freed on it and what files can be deleted. The scan will take a certain amount of time (usually ranging from 30 seconds to several minutes) depending on the power of the computer and the amount of installed software. The results of the process will be displayed

in a window consisting of two tabs: Disk Cleanup and Advanced (Fig. 4.8).

On the Disk Cleanup tab, you can select the type of files to delete (for example, files contained in the Recycle Bin, temporary files, etc.). To select the required item, check the box to the left of it. In this case, the information line Amount of freed space shows the amount of freed disk space with these settings. Some folders with files can be opened for viewing by highlighting the corresponding list position with the mouse pointer and clicking the View Files button.

On the Advanced tab, you can configure additional local disk cleaning options if necessary. Using the corresponding buttons, you can delete unused Windows components or programs that have not been used for a long time. You can also free up additional disk space by deleting system restore points - clicking the corresponding button will delete all restore points except the most recent one.

The disk cleanup process is started with the OK button. Using the Cancel button, you can exit this mode without saving changes.

Why is disk defragmentation needed and how to do it

Using the Start All Programs Accessories System Tools Disk Defragmentation command, a program is launched that is designed to defragment the local disks of the computer, which allows you to optimize the system and increase its performance.

The meaning of this action is as follows. In the process of deleting unnecessary files and folders, free “spaces” are created in different places on the hard drive. New documents and directories are written to these free spaces on the hard drive, thus they are fragmented, that is, divided into fragments and stored in different places on the hard drive. As a result, access to specific files slows down, which ultimately negatively affects system performance. After defragmenting the hard drive, such files and folders are combined (that is, their fragments are located in adjacent sectors of the hard drive). In other words, defragmentation allows you to organize the location of files and folders stored on your hard drive, speeding up access to them.

NOTE

When you execute the Disk Defragmentation command, the defragmentation program window opens (Fig. 4.9).

This window provides a list of all partitions on the computer's hard drive. The corresponding columns for each disk display its name, date and time of the last defragmentation, as well as information about the percentage of fragmentation. Before defragmentation, it is recommended to analyze the state of the current disk to determine whether this action is appropriate. To do this, select the corresponding disk in the list with the mouse pointer and click the Analyze disk button. After analysis, information will be displayed in brackets

To start defragmenting your hard drive, click the Disk Defragmenter button. In this case, information about this process will be displayed in the Progress column (Fig. 4.10).