An informational and technical guide to selecting the best hard drive for building a new computer or upgrading a current system.

Formatting a Hard Drive and Hard Drive Basics

The hard drive is the workhorse of your computer, but how does it actually work and how do you maintain it so it will last as long as possible and perform to its peak. Here is a basic description of how your hard drive works, and what you can do to make sure it keeps working the way it should.

How Does a Hard Drive Work?

When you save a file to your hard drive, it is magnetically recorded onto a platter (a flat disk) inside your hard drive. Most hard drives have several platters mounted on a spindle that allows them to spin as fast as 15,000 times per minute. Each two-sided platter is mounted on a single arm with a slider that lets the heads move across the surface of the platter to access data. It is kind of like how phonograph records are read by the needle but incredibly fast and back and forth.

The amount of data each platter can hold is usually measured in Tracks Per Inch, where a track equals one concentric ring around a disk. Because of the amount of data that can be stored in a single track, each track is divided into sectors, and each sector holds roughly 512 bytes of information. When you save data to the disk, it is referenced according to its track and sector. Click here to see a graphic of the internal components of a hard drive.

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Hard Drive Organization

Occasionally your hard drive will make a whirring sound as it searches for a file. This is the sound of the platters spinning as the read heads zoom back and forth to "seek" the sectors where the data has been stored.

You can speed up this process by periodically “defragmenting” your hard drive. The Windows Disk Defragmenter utility reorganizes the scattered data on your hard drive to make your files run more efficiently. It also moves the files that you use most often to the beginning of the hard disk where they’ll load faster.

To run Disk Defragmenter in Windows XP, follow these directions:

Click Start > Programs > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter.
You should analyze a drive (volume) before defragmenting it. Because defragmenting can sometimes take hours, this tells you whether you need to take the time to perform this task. Click the Analyze button.
A drive must have at least 15 percent free space for Disk Defragmenter to completely and adequately defragment it. Disk Defragmenter uses this space as a sorting area for file fragments. If a volume has less than 15 percent free space, Disk Defragmenter will only partially defragment it. To increase the free space on a volume, delete unneeded files or move them to another disk.
Click the Defragment button.
To interrupt or temporarily stop defragmenting a volume, click Stop or Pause, respectively.

The bottom frame displays a graphical representation of the utilities progress.

Cleaning Up Your Hard Drive

Another powerful utility that comes with Windows is Disk Cleanup. This application allows you to easily sort through and delete unused and temporary files, freeing space on your hard drive and speeding up its operation.

To run Disk Cleanup in Windows 98, Windows Millennium, and Window XP:

Go to Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools and select Disk Cleanup.
Choose the drive you want to scan from the drop-down menu, and wait while the program calculates how much disk space is available for cleanup.
On the Disk Cleanup tab, check the boxes next to the types of files you want to remove.
Temporary Internet Files are Web pages stored on your hard drive for quick access. Deleting these files will leave intact your Internet browser preferences and bookmarks.
Downloaded Program Files are Java and ActiveX applications downloaded from the Internet to view certain pages.
The Recycle Bin contains files you have deleted from your system. They are not permanently removed until you empty the bin.
Temporary Files are created by some applications to temporarily store data. Typically, the data is deleted when the program closes, and it is safe to delete these files if they have not been modified in over a week. Clicking the View Files button will display the files to be deleted in a separate window.
To remove Windows components or unused programs, click the More Options tab. Clicking the appropriate Cleanup button will open the Add/Remove Programs utility, where you can then select what you would like to delete.

The ScanDisk Utility in Windows

If you have ever turned off your computer without properly shutting down the system (or had to restart after a hard drive crash), then you have probably seen your computer run a utility called ScanDisk. ScanDisk checks the hard drive for errors and, if it finds any, marks the cluster of sectors containing the error as unusable, so that no data can be written to or read from that portion of the disk.

You can also run ScanDisk from within Windows. This allows you to do a more thorough scan of your hard drive and detect errors that might make it difficult or impossible to read or write to the disk.

Windows XP refers to ScanDisk as an "error-checking" tool; to perform error-checking, follow these directions:

Open My Computer, then select the local disk you want to check.
On the File menu, click Properties.
On the Tools tab, under Error-checking, click Check Now.
Under Check Disk options, select the “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” box.

ScanDisk should not take very long to run, and should probably be done every two or three months just to be safe. It will give you a report of the number and types of errors it has found, and can even automatically repair some of these errors. More serious errors can be repaired by reformatting the drive, if the errors are "soft" errors (which means that the magnetic signal on the disk is weak or the formatting is bad).

"Hard" errors, however, refer to actual physical damage to the disk, such as a scratch or a bump, and cannot be repaired. If you have a large number of hard errors on your disk, you will probably need to replace your hard drive.

The average life span for today's hard drive is between three and five years. Simple maintenance can keep your hard drive running smoothly well past the time it has become obsolete.

Go to: How to Format a Hard Drive

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