2. Buying Insurance Against Notebook Drive Failure

You really can't do much to prevent hard disk drive failure other than making sure your notebook's cooling vents are not blocked and handling your notebook with reasonable care. You can, however, buy some insurance against such failure by taking the steps below.

Make Regular Backups: I think the folk mantra is "Backup, backup, backup." These days, backups are easier than ever, with availability of one-touch external backup drives, network storage appliances with backup capability, and a number of great set-it-and-forget-it tools out there. However, for the majority of us, this devolves into a case of do as I say, not as I do. It's rare to find anybody who really backs up their personal machines on a regular basis. Few do it, especially in the case of their notebooks. Remember, you are copying your data from one hard drive, to another hard drive in most cases - eventually a drive failure may happen, and it could be the drive with the backup data. The good news is that both your notebook and your backup drive are unlikely to fail at the same time.

Use Offline Folders: At my workplace, all the machines, especially the notebooks use Microsoft Offline folders and the My Documents folder is replicated all over. If I literally lost my notebook, I could log into any other computer and see my stuff there. Offline folders are a lifesaver many times over, but the flip side is S-L-O-W performance.

Choose Better Drives: When you bought your notebook, the drive that came with your machine is the one you're stuck with. When it comes time to replace that drive, look for drives with fluid bearings and long mean time to failure ratings. Most 2.5" drives run fairly cool, but, look for cooler running drives.

Use RAID 1: Chances are, if you have an über high end notebook, you might have the option of installing two drives and enabling RAID. In a RAID 1 situation, you have two identical drives, both storing identical data. If one drive fails, you can swap out the bad drive, and not experience any data loss. Now, some people have the misconception that there are no performance gains to be had for RAID 1. A good optimized RAID 1 driver will interleave reads across the two drives and achieve RAID 0-like performance. The drawback is increased cost, decreased storage, and a hit on write performance. But, if you can afford to do so, RAID 1 is a thumbs-up - especially on a notebook!

Alienware's Aurora m9700 has room for two hard disk drives, which can be configured as RAID 1 for redundancy or RAID 0 for performance. The two drives are on the lower right side where identical copper strips are visible.