How to keep the health of my HDD at 100%

[taimoorbaig382]

PLEASE MOVE THIS THREAD TO "STORAGE" SECTION! I CREATED THIS THREAD IN "SYSTEMS" SECTION BY MISTAKE. THANKS.








Hello everyone! I am planning to purchase a new HDD maybe a Seagate Barracuda 7200 or Western Digital Green 7200.



"MY USAGE"

1. Playing And Installing AAA Video
Games
2. Downloading Huge Data Through
IDM And uTorrent. (Pics)

Disk is always at 100% usage when playing games and when IDM appends all downloaded parts into one file.



"Causes Of Problems ( my thoughts )"

1. In Pakistan, electricity can go out
any time. So PC turns off
unexpectedly.

2. While gaming, disk is always at
100% usage.


"My Querries"

1. How to avoid any decrease in
HDD'S health?

2. How to avoid bad sectors and
weak sectors?


"Note"
Games that I play are 100% original and legit so please don't try to be a spy or something!

Anything else you want to know, feel free to ask. Thanks everyone.

 

[mortemas]

You need an uninterruptible power supply

 

[taimoorbaig382]

Mortemas, this means that turning off of my PC unexpectedly causes the health of HDD to drop?

 

[mortemas]

Yes, see this Tom's thread here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3266699/sudden-power-outage-damage-modern-hdds-hard-drives.html

 

[photonboy]

1) Your HDD should never be constantly at 100% usage especially when gaming since drive access is usually quite rare.

2) A UPS costs money but it does prevent power interruption crashes (battery backup like Cyberpower). If you consider that make sure it's compatible with a PFC circuit in a PSU (some models have "PFC" in the name).

Aside from the UPS you can't actually prevent any damage to the HDD from shut downs. If it's on and spinning which it will be when gaming (or always on if you haven't set power options to shut down after period of inactivity) then it's going to crash on you.

Modern HDD's probably have some capacitors to store enough power to park the drive head though I'm not certain.

So either it's going to crash and damage the HDD platters or it's going to crash and NOT damage the platters because the HDD stores enough power to park the head. If you can't keep the power stable via a UPS then there's nothing you can do either way.

Update: another option is to have a USB HDD then periodically backup your drive to it. Not as good as the UPS option, though ideally you could do both.

 

[taimoorbaig382]

Photonboy,

1. How can I monitor my HDD usage while gaming?

2. How can I know that my HDD stores some power for the head or not?

3. I cannot purchase a UPS System. It's too damn expensive here.

NOTE
PLEASE MOVE THIS THREAD TO "STORAGE" SECTION! I CREATED THIS THREAD IN "SYSTEMS" SECTION BY MISTAKE. THANKS.

 

[mortemas]

Photonboy,

1. How can I monitor my HDD usage while gaming?

2. How can I know that my HDD stores some power for the head or not?

3. I cannot purchase a UPS System. It's too damn expensive here.

NOTE
PLEASE MOVE THIS THREAD TO "STORAGE" SECTION! I CREATED THIS THREAD IN "SYSTEMS" SECTION BY MISTAKE. THANKS.

1) Windows task manager

2) It doesn't. That feature is usually external and found in speacialized systems. Regular hard drives will usually have a spring that returns the head to park position when power is lost, but if the cache hasn't been written to disk at time of power loss then you will lose data.

3) Sorry, my friend. I don't know of another way to protect your hard drive due to power loss other than to use a laptop that will instantly run on battery if power is lost.