This is part 3 of a 5 part series on how to prevent your hard drive from crashing.  I also did a computer knowledge podcast on the subject of how to prevent your hard drive from crashing.

Today we’ll discuss some options on adding a second hard drive to your system, one of the easiest ways to give you some security about your personal data.  I always recommend to people to have a second hard drive, be it internal or external.  If you’re worried about installing an internal hard drive yourself, don’t be.  If you  know how to operate a screwdriver, you have all the skills necessary to install a hard drive.  But, if you’re just plain lazy (like me), go for the external.  Read on to find out why you want to add a second hard drive.

Let’s talk about some basic options that are easily available to implement a good data management plan.

Option 1: Consider having two internal hard drives.
Most home computers generally all come with only one internal hard drive. This one hard drive stores both software and user data. Which means that this one single hard drive is experiencing a lot of wear and tear. Every time a program is launched it’s being accessed. Every single function that the operating system invokes will likely hit the hard drive etc. This heavy wear and tear can eventually lead to physical failures. Also, many viruses are designed to hit the operating system. If the user data is on the same physical drive as the operating system, then it can be severely impacted by viruses as well.

So why not install a second internal hard drive. Very few people ever think of this option and, with the price of hard drives going down drastically, it’s a very cost effective approach to securing user data. What does this accomplish? Well, first of all, using this approach, the user data can be physically separated from the software data. The main drive, also known as the boot or master drive, would be strictly dedicated to holding only the operating system and all other software. The second hard drive (known as the slave drive) would be strictly dedicated to storing only your user data.

Here are the benefits of this approach. First and foremost the user data is completely isolated to a more secure and less used drive. This drive would experience a lot less wear and tear. Also, it would be much easier to back up your data onto other storage mediums such as writable compact disks (cds) or digital versatile disks (dvds). That’s because this data would be in one centralized place. In other words, user data is much easier to find when it is isolated on a separate drive.

Another key point regarding storing user data on the primary drive is that it is also much more at risk for viruses. Again, by isolating user data onto a physically separate drive, the risk of data loss or corruption from viruses would be greatly minimized.

Another strong point for this option is that total system recoveries (i.e. re-installing the operating system) is much easier if you don’t have to include re-installing the user data as well. The main hard drive can quickly be reformatted without worrying about backing up the user data and then re-imaged with a fresh copy of the operating system.

What, no more options for today?  Nope, you’ll have to come back tomorrow!  I know, I know, you just can’t wait.  Didn’t your mother teach you that patience is a virtue?