World Association of Zoos and Aquariums

This text has been written especially for the possessors of the hard disk drives that often complain of the graceful degradation during the process of exploitation. The most dangerous thing which can be consequence of such mistakes is the appearing of the faulty sectors that can not be used for data storage or even sometimes can produce a loss of data.

Statistics that is provided by the local service centers shows that actually a few of hard disks brought back by the consumers should be sent to the producer. Most of cases are just “wrong returns” when all the problems of the hard disk can be resolved in several minutes. That is not necessary even to open the cabinet.

There are a lot of utilities - some special programs which are created especially to be used by customers that have any problems with hard disk utilizing. That class of software is called diagnostic and recovery instruments. We made decision to write more about these solutions as a lot of users even do not know that such utilities exist. Before the hard disk will be sent to the developer the personnel of the service center should execute some tests that will demand a lot of time.

Some defects may occur simply during the process of development as it is almost impossible to avoid such. There are no developers which can promote the complete absence of faulty areas. There were some models of the hard disks that had predetermined bad sectors and their addresses were established on the packing. It was great that creators didn't try to color the truth and bring the clients more information. Today every HDD has got its own integral controller that is powered by S.M.A.R.T. technology. The basic function of this controller is to watch over the actions of information reading and to execute disk usage analysis.

So this controller operating together with S.M.A.R.T. system can prevent a lot of essential data from being lost as it will correct the errors occurred or recover information that may be lost. Read the rest of this entry »