Updating camera drives?

[Ian McHenry]

On the BBC programme "Click" recently it was recommended that computer drives should be updated periodically.
My PC is about 3 years old and uses Windows XP.
Have run a free scan and there are said to be 6 out of date drives but to fix them the usual $ sign shows up!!!
Is there much value in updating drives performance wise please?
Cheers: Ian Mc

[Axel Hildebrandt]

I don't think you would see a noticeable performance gain except for the one where the OS is installed. An occasional clean install helps Windows machines. As long as you backup your important files, I would not exchange the hard drives.

[John Chardine]

If I take your question Ian you are asking about hard disks?

Hard disks are physical devices with motors, bearing surfaces etc. Therefore they wear out because there is no "shop maintenance" like a grease and oil job and there are no user replaceable parts- they are throw-away items. The more the hard drive is filled, the more it has to work to read and write files. So it is best to buy a big drive and not use it to capacity.

Eventually, and usually without warning the disk will crash. At the end it is a death spiral as the disk is reading more and more errors, and having to read over and over again to get the correct information. If this happens, data can sometimes be recovered for a fee but I wouldn't bank on it. This is why everything you do not want to lose needs to be backed up somewhere else because any drive at any time can crash. I am not sure how often a hard drive should be replaced but there are programs out there that will test a drive and tell you if it is close to the end. I think they measure read/write errors.

To directly answer your question, all other things being equal, a fresh large capacity drive with lots of free space will normally perform much better than a tired, almost full disk that is thrashing around trying to read without errors, re-reading over and over again, and trying to write to the little bits of free space that might be left on the disk.

[Ian McHenry]

Thanks Axel & John.
Really comprehensive reply.
As I only usually have about half available GBs used sounds OK meantime but available RAM is another story !!!

[Ed Cordes]

On the other hand, if you defrag regularly and run one of the software packages that clean junk out of your system, including registry cleaning and defragging, your drive life "should be" about equal to your system life. A 5 year old system with 5 year old internal is probably due for a total upgrade anyway. Replacing drives that are working well after performing the above maintenance will be putting $$ into a system you will soon replace anyway.

[Ian McHenry]

Thanks Ed.
All helps to fill in the jigsaw.
Cheers: Ian Mc

[WIlliam Maroldo]

Out of date "drives" that you said the scan showed must actually referring to "drivers" and not hard drives. A driver is software that does periodically need to be updated, especially with video cards, and it is supposed to enhance performance. Sometimes it doesn't, and you can rollback to a previous driver pretty easily.
I can't imagine replacing a hard drive just to update it. The number one rule is Back up your data! This could be to another hard drive ( I prefer external hard drives) or even optical media, like DVDs. There has been an indication that CDs can go bad with time, and I have experienced this myself with 8 year old data CDs being unreadable. It has something to do with the coating, I think. Anyway, although DVDs may not have this problem, they might and only time will tell.
Although a hard drive may just suddenly crash, as far as I know most of the time there are tell tale signs, like a grinding sound when it is operating. In any case, I own 4 internal and 7 external hard drives, many filled to capacity, and only one (9 years old) has failed. ~Bill

[Ian McHenry]

Thanks Bill for clearing that up.
Cheers: Ian Mc