Dr. T: 2 ways to keep your Hard Drive running incredibly fast and smooth

Dr. T: 2 ways to keep your Hard Drive running incredibly fast and smooth

by Transcend Information Inc. on Monday, 31 January 2011 at 09:01

People love to use portable hard drives as they are compact, easy to carry, and provide ample capacity for space-hungry files such as digital photos, videos, music and HD movies. But portable hard drives are also very fragile while you use it improperly. Today, let’s talk about how to use a portable hard drive correctly to avoid mistakes that may cause severe damage.

To know how your hard drive works, let’s first take a quick look at the main components inside: platter, head, spindle motor and actuator arm.

The platters in a drive are clamped to a rotating spindle that turns all the platters in unison. The spindle motor is built right into the spindle and spins the platters at a constant set rate. Insufficient spindle motor voltage or current can result in instability of the drive.

To keep your portable hard drive running fast and smooth, there are two tips you got to know:

◎ Use the Y-cable and connect BOTH ends

Portable hard drives need more than 500mA of current to spin up when first connected to a PC. On some computers, a single USB 2.0 port only provides a maximum of 500mA, which might be insufficient to allow your hard drive to spin up properly. 

As a result, always use the supplied USB Y-Cable—one input of which is used for power and data transfer, the other solely for power—and be sure to connect BOTH ends to two USB ports on your computer. This will provide the additional power necessary to run the drive.

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(USB 3.0 model connected to USB 2.0 ports）

Reminder: If your portable hard drive uses USB 3.0 interface, you will have to use a USB power cable along with a USB 3.0 cable, instead of using the USB 2.0 Y-cable. 

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(USB 3.0 model connected to USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 ports）

◎ Take advantage of low level format tool 

Most failure symptoms might be caused by logical bad sectors within your portable hard drive’s internal hard disk drive. Fortunately, there is a quick and easy way to fix these logical bad sectors without having to send your drive in for warranty repair. When you are unable to read or format your portable hard drive, or find your hard drive slows down, try to use a low level format tool. The following link provides step-by-step instructions on how to restore your StoreJet portable hard drive back to normal.

 ★ http://www.transcend.com.tw/HDD Bad sector recovery SOP.pdf

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