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Guide to hard disk drive management

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Guide to hard disk drive management

Despite their advances in reliability, hard disk drives still pose many questions for Windows administrators. Does a new drive need to be formatted? How many passes does it take to ensure that data on the drive has been erased? How can you tell if a drive is about to fail? In this technical guide, SearchWinComputing.com contributors identify some issues they've encountered while managing and maintaining hard disk drives.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Introduction
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Be wary of preformatted external hard disk drives
- Hard disk drive MTBFs: The four biggest misperceptions
- Hard disk drives dying: Six signs a hard drive is about to fail
- Storage management software helps when hard disk drives fail
- Quick-formatting hard disk drives: A shortcut, but safe
- Erasing hard disk drive data: How many passes are needed?

Having problems defragging your hard disk drive? Check out our Disk Defragmentation Fast Guide, and receive step-by-step defragmentation advice.

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This was first published in March 2007

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