Premature wear of my internal hard drive

[cbc4120]

I recently bought an ADS Tech Instant TV Deluxe video capture device with TV tuner. It's an external device. I am recording and playing back TV shows from my hard drive. Currently I only have about 19gigbytes of free space available. I'm also always deleting the shows due to limited space. Am I damaging my hard drive?

Dell Dimension 2400
Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.66 GHz
768 MB memory
Intel 82845G/GL/GE/PE/GV Graphics Controller (video card)
SoundMAX Integrated Digital Audio (sound card)
40Gb total hard drive

:thumbsup:

[gsinpei]

You do need to get a larger drive, they are cheap these days.
Hard drives are meant to be written to and read from, make them earn their keep while they are spinning! Seagates have a 5 year warranty and run quiet... so that should give you some peace of mind.

[Darkk]

There is no real concern about pre-mature wear on hard drives. However, make sure you give it plenty of cooling to prevent drive issues.

Darkk

[dlandrum]

Be sure your cluster size if 64k.
Keep anti-virus apps away from your video directories.

I have had great success with the samsung spinmaster drives. I think I have 10 of them around the house.

[Zaap]

Keeping drives cool is probably the best way to prolong their lifespan. A front case fan pulling air over the drives can keep their temps down.

If you want to keep tabs on your drives, I'd recommend the app Speed Fan (http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php). It's not just a fan speed tool- it monitors CPU, system and hard drive temps and reports hard drive S.M.A.R.T. information. (Basically, a drive's built in monitor for failure prediction.)

[Fickey]

Speedfan is great, but if you monitor your drives with it, it will prevent them from spinning down (powersave). That said, I set mine to never spin down anyway because something kept occasionally accessing them & spinning them up for no apparent reason. Not sure if it's my freebie AVG antivirus (can't exclude drives/directories), or if I forgot to switch off some stupid Microsoft service.