Spring Cleaning III: Maintain Your Hard Drive

Following up “Get Organized,” we present chapter 3 in a series of helpful Spring Cleaning tips and hints to make sure your computer (and your data) is optimized, organized, and secure.

The most important part of your computer isn’t the processor or the memory; it’s the hard drive. If the processor fails, we’ll put in a new one. If the memory fails, we’ll replace it.

If your hard drive fails, you’ll get a new one, but it’s quite possible all of your data will be lost.

We’ll discuss backing up your data in Chapter 4, but for now let’s talk about keeping your hard drive healthy and humming.

Microsoft Windows

To optimize hard drive performance, Microsoft Windows users should periodically defragment their computer’s hard drive.

Defragmenting the hard drive rearranges the data so information is continuous instead of scattered throughout the hard drive. For example, when a file is saved on the hard drive, it is usually not saved in one continuous physical location, but is broken up and stored in many locations. Defragmenting moves all data, including Windows system files, into continuous blocks, greatly improving Windows performance and file access times.

The defragmentation process can take anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours, so plan accordingly.

To launch the Windows Disk Defragmenter tool, right-click on My Computer, then left-click on Manage.

The resulting window will show all disk drives recognized by the PC. To defragment the drive, click on the (C:) drive (or other preferred hard drive), then click the Defragment button.

How often should you defragment your Microsoft Windows drive? Opinions are all over the map, but once every three months is a safe bet.

Apple Mac OS X

Defragmentation isn’t as critical for Mac OS X computers due to differences in the way OS X writes files to the hard drive, but users should verify their hard disks are optimized, and verify and repair disk permissions.

The Mac OS X Disk Utility application allows you to verify and repair your hard disk and file permissions. To run, choose Go > Utilities from the Finder menu and launch Disk Utility.

When Disk Utility opens, select your system hard drive and choose Verify Disk Permissions and/or Verify Disk to test the system without making the changes. Based on the results, you may need to continue with the Repair Disk Permissions or Repair Disk options.

Mac OS X also performs routine automatic maintenance to purge log files and temporary items. As long as your computer is left turned on and is not in Sleep Mode, these maintenance scripts will run during early morning hours. OIT recommends you periodically leave your computer turned on so these maintenance scripts can run.

To turn off Sleep Mode in OS X, choose System Preferences > Energy Saver. You can turn Sleep Mode back on after the maintenance routines have run.

Have questions? Need assistance? Call the OIT Help Desk at 426-4357, or contact us via email at helpdesk@boisestate.edu