Do laptop hard drives really fail? Several computer users have asked themselves these question and more other questions about there laptops. Here are some facts about computers and their components.

Facts

1.    One in Five computers suffers a fatal hard drive crush during their lifetime!

2.    A computer hard drive crashes after every 15 seconds.

3.    25% of lost data is due to the failure of portable drive.

4.    15% or more of laptops in Kenya only suffer hard drive failure!

These facts and others sound an alarm on how we should take care of our beloved machines especially laptops, and in deed they answer the question” Do laptop hard drives fail”. But how do you know when your laptop hard drive has actually failed?

This question is quite related to another hypothetical question such as “how do you tell when a living thing is dead?” well, I am sure that every one has a handful of answers to that question. But it’s the same thing with a laptop that has a failed hard drive. When you boot your machine and there on your screen you see a blue screen of death is one symptom of a dead machine. Another scenario is when your system displays fatal errors such as “No boot device, Primary hard drive not installed or Operating System Not fond”,

These are common errors that are displayed when your hard drive is dead or is a bout to fail. Note that the last three errors could be as a result of poor connection of the hard disk.

Some times we boot our laptops and the only thing we hear is some funny noise produced by the laptop. The cause of such noise is a failed hard drive or a failing hard disk. What produces the noise is usually the read/write head of the hard drive that is having difficulty in reading from corrupt sectors of the platters.



Thanks to Eugene Eshitemi for contributing this article to our Data Recovery blog:

Windows Xp Recovery Disk

Nowadays, it seems that not many months will pass before we encounter yet another high-profile case of data theft or loss of entire laptops. With shipments of laptops surpassing those of desktops, we can expect the situation to worsen, not get better. Expensive enterprise solutions or convoluted configurations aside, is there a simple method or strategy that the SMB can adopt to better defend against data theft via the laptop? That was the question on my mind when I came across Seagate’s Momentus FDE (full disk encryption) hard disk drive. FDE incorporated into a hard disk drive means that all data written into the hard disk is transparently encrypted - and decrypted - without the need for operating system awareness or any form of intervention.

This latest generation of FDE hard disks from Seagate comes with capacities of between 160GB and 320GB, and with platter speeds of 5400rpm and 7200rpm, according to a recent PCWorld.com article. The hard disks encrypt data with military-grade 128-bit AES encryption; a drive of 500GB is expected to be available by the end of the year.

What is unique about Seagate’s FDE drives is that they incorporate the authentication mechanism at the firmware layer.  Hence, the Momentus can be configured so that it will prompt for a secret password every time the laptop is booted up.

Just imagine how much better you would sleep in a scenario where all the laptops in your organization are equipped with FDE hard disks from Seagate. They can either be acquired together with laptops from vendors such as Lenovo, Fujitsu and NEC - or just purchased separately. Installing them is as simple as swapping the original hard disks with the FDE hard disks.

Obviously, the need to acquire the additional hardware does add to the cost of the solution. However, I believe this is the best solution for an SMB in terms of efficiency and ease of management.



Thanks to Paul Mah for contributing this article to our Data Recovery blog:

Hdd Partition Recovery