Hard drive workings

Culture | November 22nd, 2016

By Chuck Solly

rcsolly@gmail.com

A most critical part of your computer: the hard drives these days come in two forms, the spinning platter type and the solid state drive (SSD). You can use either type to store your data and both types can blow up in your face.

Some of the things I tell you today can hurt your system (and therefore your data). If you are a newbie, call someone who knows, or email me and I will point you in the correct direction for help.

Firstly, hard drives always fill up. Thirty years ago I bragged to my geek friends about my 10 MB (yes, mega byte!) hard drive. I told them that my hard drive was so huge that it would never fill up.... This is even more true if you’re using a solid-state drive (SSD), which offers much less hard drive space than traditional mechanical (platter) hard drives.

If you’re hurting for hard drive space, this trick should help you free up space for important files and programs by removing the unimportant junk cluttering up your hard disk: Windows includes a built-in tool that deletes temporary files and other unimportant data.

To access it, right-click one of your hard drives in the Computer window and select Properties. After using Disk Cleanup, there are several programs that you can buy to cleanup some other areas of your drive. Read the reviews for these programs online before purchasing.

WinDirStat is a free program you can find at www.ninite.com. This program will show you where your largest folders and files reside. Be VERY careful when deleting files from the drive. If you delete the wrong system file it will render your computer DEAD!

Uninstalling programs will free up space, but some programs use very little space. From the Programs and Features control panel, you can click the Size column to see just how much space each program installed on your computer is using. The easiest way to get there is to search for “Uninstall programs” in the Start Menu.

Analyze disk space: to find out exactly what is using space on your hard drive, you can use a hard disk analysis program. The problem with these programs is that there are many of them. Try the free ones first. There are many limitations to these programs, not the least of which is price. Some are very expensive.

One of the latest sites to evaluate hard drives is www.lifewire.com. Try this site before you buy.

One other thing to mention before I leave you to worry about whether your hard drive is going to go away tonight, how long will it be before your hard drive dies and you must have a modest funeral?

There are very good predictions about MTBF. This means simply Mean Time Between Failure. You can explore the web to find out how long yours will last, but there is an easier way: buy an external hard drive, plug it into your computer and copy ALL of your data files to it.

Problem solved...

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