What's the life span of a hard disk? does the computer just stop functioning?

Answer 1

As long as you defrag ( very important ) your hard-drive regularly, and don't fill it to capacity, keep spyware, malware, trojans and virus out, it should last for the life of the computer.

Answer 2

I am not really sure what the life span is, but i had a computer that I used for over 9 years and never had a problem. No, the computer does not just stop functioning. you would notice that items would not be found or programs would stop working. If you have a very old computer hard drive, you might consider saving all of your important things to a cd.

Answer 3

It depends on the hard disk. I have a PC I bought in '99 that is still going strong. I just had to replace the hard drive in my girlfriends 3 year old laptop two months ago.

Generally, your hard drive will start slowing down. (It's hard to differentiate a slow hard drive from insufficient/bad memory.) It may also start making grinding noises. Another thing is that there may be sectors of memory that go bad, whereupon you loose data. If the data loss is within the Operating System, it may force you to reinstall the OS. Not everyone will catch the signs of a failing hard drive. When the hard drive does fail, your Motherboard should still operate. Often, it will list an error message stating that the hard drive can not be found.

If you have not already done so, BACK UP YOUR DATA! If you are looking at replacing the hard drive, try to get at least a 7200rpm and a 16mb cache. Most laptops us the same style of a 3.5" hard drive and ATA-6 connections, so they are easy to pick up. If you have a PC, you should determine if you have an EIDE/Parallel connector (wide, ribbon style connection) or a SATA connector (a much smaller connection).

Good luck!