Hard drive tips and care.

These tips come from our friends at Glyph Technologies. For more information on drive care and maintenance, visit .

1. Backup!
While we manufacture our drives to the highest specifications and the vast majority of our drives will serve faithfully for years without a hitch, nothing can prevent occasional failures, either of a drive or of some other part of a system. Counting on data recovery software as a replacement for backing up is not a reliable method of safe data storage.

2. Don’t expose your drive to the elements.
When bringing the drive in from the outdoors, allow a few minutes for the drive to readjust to the temperature inside.

3. Never move or handle a spinning drive.
Always wait at least 30 to 45 seconds after powering down before handling a drive. This is especially critical with Hot Swap and tabletop models.

4. Many problems that appear to be hard drive problems are actually SCSI problems.
– Use short, high quality Glyph cables, proper termination, and proper addressing.
– Macintosh: When setting SCSI addresses, remember that the Mac’s CPU is at SCSI address 7, your first internal hard drive is probably set at SCSI ID 0, your second internal hard drive is conventionally set at SCSI ID 1, and if you have an internal CD ROM drive it’s probably factory set at SCSI ID 3. If in doubt on how to set a SCSI address on a device consult the manual or contact the manufacturer for assistance. Incorrectly set switches can result in data loss.
– PC: When setting SCSI ID addresses, remember that typically the SCSI card in the PC is pre-set at SCSI address 7. This leaves SCSI ID 0-6 If in doubt on how to set a SCSI address on a device consult the manual or contact the manufacturer for assistance. Incorrectly set switches can result in data loss.

6. Shut off your computer before you shut off your drive.
At shutdown your computer wants to perform housekeeping on any attached volume and if you shut off the drive first, the computer doesn’t get a chance to do this. Therefore, use the shutdown command from the menu and after powering down your computer, shut off the hard drives. Similarly, be sure to power up all your external SCSI devices before starting up your computer.

7. Avoid SCSI cables that are old or long.
Old or long cables may cause any number of problems, and often make a perfectly good drive appear faulty. Even when using the highest quality cables connector ends can corrode, the wires may become damaged and long cables can cause signal degradation.

8. If you’re having problems with a drive, disconnect any external SCSI devices (besides the suspect drive)
Make sure that the remaining device is terminated and has a unique SCSI ID. You will then be able to test and diagnose the drive without interference that other devices may cause. Many apparent drive failures will be miraculously fixed by this step. Should you find your drive working again, try adding your other devices into the chain one at a time. If your system fails again, try rearranging the order of the chain, making sure the first and last SCSI devices are terminated and that each device has a unique SCSI ID. If you’re getting error messages or system crashes, or your system won’t boot, try reinstalling a your system (Windows 95/98, MacOS 8.1). System files often become corrupted and a fresh system installation will solve many an elusive problem.

On Macintosh, be sure to install the system from floppies or from CD-ROM and not to drag and drop your old system folder on to another volume. If you’re installing your new system on a multi-volume drive, make the name of the volume you want to boot from come first alphabetically among volume names. This is accomplished by making the first character of the boot volume a bullet (option-8).

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