Tech Tip - Increased Portable Hard Drive Failures

Do you use portable hard drives? Are you aware that the way you use them might be be damaging the drive?

We're seeing an increase in the number of failures with portable harddrives and of course it's really easy to lose a vast amount of information with a faulty 1Tb or 2Tb drive these days, and it's usually the "day before" you were going to do a backup! 

This is what we often see when a portable harddrive is brought in for us to transfer a clients Audio or Video files on to or when they are bringing in a drive with their artwork for a CD or DVD project. 

1Tb Portable Harddrive

Typically the USB cable is left connected and wrapped around the drive. What we're finding is that the connector is being moved around inside cases, back packs or when dropped etc. This is damaging the connections inside the drive casing and levering the small pins inside the connector, this then can cause the drive to stop working.    

So there's a really simple solution to improving the life of the drive - Remove the cable before packing the drive away for transport.