How to manage a Hard drive?

It is the 7th Harddisk that has failed me in 2 years. I dont want the 8th one to also fail on me.





I am a guy who does a lotta downloading and stuff and keeps his files here and there and whenever gets time arranges 'em all. I defrag most of the time cuz I know the importance of that but I will be the unlucky guy to hear my HD clicking, scratching, screehing, whatever.





All the HD I had were of Western Digital. I always assign a part of my HD for paging cuz I dont have enough RAM. I usually save my movies in Local disk (D) and when I click a file to play it begins slowly as compared to the fast Local Disk (C). Why?





Due to these frequent failures, I back up my files whenever possible. I just dont know why the hell these HD fail on me. The HDs I buy are OEMs - is that a problem?





I know HDs arent shock proof so I handle it the right way. But who knows how was it handled by the shopowner before I bought it.





Please enlighten me, how to manage/run a HD for 2 years minimum

How to manage a Hard drive?
First of all, don't defrag all the time. Defragmenting your hard drive is the leading cause of hard drive failure for people who do it all the time. Honestly, I'm a power user and I defrag my system maybe once a week at the most. Even then, in some circles that can be considered excessive.





Your best bet is to get a hard drive for your OS / Programs, and a storage drive for your data files. If you can, buy two of the same size and use them in tandem. It's much easier to back up to another drive and keep duplicates on your system locally than it is to copy them across a network or to DVD / CDs all the time.





Generally speaking, most hard drives should work for at least 5 years without any issue. If you feel that OEM drives are the cause, check into Seagates hard drives. All of the consumer hard drives carry a 5 year warranty and I've found from prior jobs where I maintained a network that the Seagates were excellent performers and stayed working just fine.





Bottom line though, don't defrag like you drink water. If you download a lot and you start seeing a performance degrade, do a defrag. Set it to run when you go to sleep so that its done the next day, but don't run it all the time. You're doing a great disservice to your system.





Your paging file will exist unless you shut it off. Almost all computers will use a paging file, they are normal. Don't look too much into them.





SATA drives are fine, and unless you move the system a lot, SATA cables work perfectly fine. I myself run 5 hard drives in my primary tower (I do a lot of video editing) and they're all SATA. I have had zero problems with the SATA connectors falling out or otherwise being squirrelly.
Reply:Try not downloading pornographic files and music illegally which usually contains virus's as with anything downloaded from the internet...





be cautious and buy an antivirus and your HDD should last a lot longer then usually.
Reply:I think your complaint is being heard around the media world.... hard drive failure and its happening across the hard drive manufacturing board. A warranty right now from a manufacturer does not save you the pain of rebuilding your system as they do not cover the cost of data recovery.





I always ask how important is your data? Then - how many copies do you have.... how about taking a working mirror so that your set up can be replaced easily if the system goes down. The comment on defrag is a good caution - if you are experiencing read errors a defrag shuffles you data so pointers are useless. So if getting these errors do not ever run defrag.





As far as I know there is no way to buy for sure a drive to run 2 years with a guarantee. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Back up back up back up - ***and remember when you move data from original to back up and delete the original you no longer have back up but original data sitting on what - a hard drive.