Disk Failure: What are some of the causes?

How does disk failure occur? Here are some ways:

Human mishandling, carelessness and motive: Human beings are not perfect beings and therefore, prone to cause data loss. It could be in the form of accidental erasure, mishandling of computer hardware, hacking, theft, arson and many other ways of destruction. The individual’s motive is the one that matters. If, for example, I want destroy information on someone else’s PC or laptop, I can “accidentally” drop it or look for a way of causing destruction e.g. infect the machine with a virus. It all boils down to the motive. So how can one prevent this you may ask? There is no one particular way but one use passwords, provide physical security in an organization and just being careful with your computers and laptop.

Power surges: This is another way disk failure occurs. A power surge occurs when the power company supplies more voltage in the mains than required. All computer hardware is designed to handle a certain amount of voltage. Anything greater than the specified voltage will ultimately lead to hardware failure. This means that the hard disk can crash if there is a power surge. The best way to protect against these power problems is to get the Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) to help regulate and also store electrical energy.

Virus infection: If your computer is infected by viruses, your hard disk is bound to start failing and this will lead to corruption of information and also data loss. What happens is that when the hard drive is infected by viruses, the viruses replicate and infect many sectors of the hard disk. These sectors have files stored in them. The virus changes the original information that was stored in this sectors and this is what we call corruption of files. This is why if a certain file is accessed, there could be an error message saying ‘Corrupted file’. The way to protect against viruses is to install anti-virus software. This is software that detects the presence of viruses and gives solutions on what can be done to them. It is also advisable to scan all external storage devices like USB flash disks, CDs, DVDs and external hard disks before use. Performing regular scans of your computer system is also recommended.

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