A simple but important hard disk maintenance procedure is to optimize the hard disk. Optimizing involves two changes: rearranging the sectors on the disk, and rearranging the files stored in those sectors. Without getting technical, try to visualize sectors as pigeon holes, into which pages of your file are placed. By rearranging the pigeon holes (called "changing the interleave factor") to eliminate wasted time, the disk can immediately read and write any file much faster. This need be done just once: when a hard disk is first installed in a computer. A separate part of optimization you can do every week or every month is to rearrange all the program and data files on your hard disk so each file is stored in sectors (pigeon holes) as close together as possible. This allows each file to be read in the shortest possible time.

The net result of these two optimizing changes is to make a disk operate two, three, even four or five times faster than it did before.

Many software packages are available to optimize your files. SpinRite (from Gibson Research) and Speedisk (from Norton Utilities) are both very capable programs for optimizing a hard disk's interleave. Both programs examine your disk, recommend an optimum interleave factor, and then can change the interleave factor without damaging the data already stored on the disk. However, on large disks the process can take overnight.

A third important hard disk maintenance procedure is to check for data storage errors at least once or twice a year. Maintenance software can detect a variety of problems, from physical defects on the hard disk's surface to weakened magnetic forces that make one sector of a hard disk potentially unreliable. The software can also fix most of these problems before your hard disk destroys your data. It's like giving the disk a new lease on life. I remember one hard disk that became very balky about receiving new files. Copying files took a very long time and the disk sometimes refused to copy a file from a floppy. I reworked that disk with one of these maintenance programs last year and have had no problems with it ever since.

Improving Performance

Once the disk operates reliably and as fast as its design and construction allows, you can further increase performance by installing a disk cache. Whether in hardware or software, a disk cache essentially provides a fast memory space in which the computer temporarily stores data moving to and from the hard disk. This greatly improves responsiveness in several ways. Small bits of data moving to the hard disk are "saved up" and written in fewer, but larger chunks. More importantly,
data requested by the processor from the hard disk is read in larger chunks and held in the disk cache, where it can be read again without waiting for the hard disk to respond. Because computers tend to perform many tasks in multiple tiny steps, a disk cache produces a surprising
increase in overall computer performance.

There are other problems to which a hard disk is prey, such as boot record, partition table, and FAT file errors--any one of which can partly or completely prevent your computer from utilizing the hard disk. These, too, can often be prevented and fixed with software.

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