A normal drive is claimed to last anywhere between 3 to 5 years. They typically have several spinning plates with a writing needle and they spin at speeds of 7200 R.P.M (revolutions per minute). There are faster drives out there, spinning at 15,000 RPM and Solid State Drives (SSD), which have no moving parts in any way.

Any item with moving parts will have wear, and will ultimately stop working. If you were talking about a t-shirt, that would be fine, but your hard drive often stores things such as your work, family pictures, and your music collection. Having a tough drive fail on you may be terrible.

It is easy to claim that you should have all your important data backed up, either on an external drive or on a hosted backup platform. However what do you do when your drive fails with all your files on it? Is it gone? Well, not really.

There are specialists who cope with recovering data from damaged hard drives. This process is not particularly cheap, so you need to consider how valuable is the data that hard drive. It may cost well over �1,000!

So what do they (or your IT support company) do that you can’t? To start they take the drive apart and remove the platters. You might do this yourself, but the next stage is what makes it expensive: the expert software. They place the platters onto a special gizmo which can read the data and the software tries to join up the bits on the hard disk.

This data is then pieced together by the software, and the end result is usually a percentage of the total amount of data you had. You will have to pay for the process and success is never guaranteed. So again you’ll need to ask yourself if it’s worth doing. Here’s to praying that you’ll never find yourself in that case, but if you are in a jam, it’s nice to know that there are options.

Prosyn was established in 2002 to bring enterprise level IT support to the small and medium business sectors in the UK. So far Prosyn provides its ‘ unique kind of IT support in London and surrounding counties, with particular focus on small business IT support.

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