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An external hard drive is a tremendously handy device, we all know this. We can store our photos on it, music and any computer software that we require on a mobile basis.  The biggest issue with these devices however, is that due to the fact that they are so portable and get used in numerous different environments; they are extremely prone to physical damage. This article takes a look at 5 of the most common causes that result in a damaged portable external hard drive:

1. Turn it off

This may seem obvious, but an external USB hard drive is not manufactured to remain on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Ideally, they need to be switched off when not in use. This prevents them from overheating, being moved around whilst the power is on, or being accidentally disconnected. Any sort of damage caused by being on for too long a period could result in you not being able to power the machine on again and having to contact a data recovery specialist to have your data extracted.

Most often data recovery specialists have to deal with hard drives that have been damaged, broken or corrupted by their unsuspecting owners. However, the job also entails regularly having to deal with the consequences of malicious computer viruses that infect computers, designed by ill-intentioned outsiders.

Although security measures and computer virus protection software is ever-improving, hackers and identity thieves are continually finding more cunning ways to steal information and create general chaos.

Here are three of the most heinous and destructive computer viruses of all time:

1. The Melissa virus

Creator David L. Smith paid tribute to a Florida stripper in naming his virus, which was the first effective email-aware virus to cause damage to a whopping twenty percent of the world’s computers in 1999. Email servers all over the world had to shut down entirely to remove the computer virus and prevent further spread. Melissa forwarded itself to the first 50 contacts in any unfortunate victims MS Outlook list. It also infected document files, overwriting them with quotes from ‘The Simpsons’.

A common problem experienced by computer users is what became known in the 90s as “the click of death”.

It refers to a clearly audible and repetitive clicking sound emitted from a disk storage system such as the hard drive in a laptop computer, standard pc, or external hard drive.

Picture by lyrandian on Flickr.

The inside of a hard drive consists primarily of a smooth round platter which contains the data and an actuator arm. On the end of the arm is a small reader head which magnetically picks up the data on the platter.

The actuator arm moves the reader head over the platter to the correct position to find information being accessed by a user from the drive. However when the reader head is unable secure its position it moves back and forth over the platter, hitting against parts of the drive and resulting in the click of death.