Imagine a scenario where you press the power button on your laptop one morning, and nothing happens. Panic sets in, you’re thinking about your work files, treasured photos, or almost completed college assignments trapped inside a dead laptop, and you head to a repair centre to see what can be done to save your data. Your laptop is tested, and you’re told that your hard drive has failed, or is dying, and will need to be replaced with a new one.

Although the laptop can be repaired no problem at all, and it’s very likely your data can be recovered, is there a way to minimise this risk and save yourself the headache? Of course there is, so we’ve listed a few tips and warning signs for your hard drive to ensure you don’t suffer the loss of data or the pain of delays on your work or college projects. Over the years of reassuring panicked customers, we’ve noticed 3 common trends that may help you out of a sticky situation some day. 

1. Moving your laptop. 

We get it, it’s a laptop – it’s portable, it’s mobile and you need to travel with it. Perfect. However, if your laptop has a hard drive in it, consider that there’s a spinning disk whirring around with all your data stored on it. This means that moving the laptop around while it’s powered on is not the best idea, or shutting the laptop down, and then sticking it in a bag while the hard drive is still spinning. The important thing to note here is that you might not have a problem from doing this for a year, or even more, but all those times added up can really increase the risk of laptop failure. 

2. Laptop getting really slow

If your laptop begins to get really slow, that could be a warning sign for a struggling hard drive. We’ve all had computers at work or at home that take an age to power on or do anything, even open simple programs. A lot of the time, the computer is still usable, so although it’s possible to avoid addressing the issue, getting it resolved at that point can be much easier than solving the issue down the line when the hard drive completely fails.

3. Power Cutting 

If your laptop has a battery that’s not holding power anymore, and the laptop needs to be plugged into a charger to use it, you need to be careful with how the power is managed. Cutting the power to the system suddenly can cause damage to the hard drive, but can be an issue that only becomes apparent months or even a year or more later.

If you have a slowing or struggling laptop it can be an easy fix before you have a hard drive issue, but if you have the dreaded ‘laptop not powering on’ situation, this can be repaired too, but may not be quite so simple…