Hard Drive Maintenance

All hard drive maintenance tasks covered from hard drive upgrades, tune-ups
low-level repairs, physical drive repairs, re-partitioning and drive image backups.

Does your hard drive spend a lot of time crunching away?

Are you using a lot of large files?

Are you using resource extensive applications like Adobe Premiere?

Is the speed of your hard drive important to you?

 

Then, consider replacing your conventional hard drive with a Solid State Drive (SSD).

Your computer’s RAM operates at far greater speed than your computer’s hard drive. The speed at which your hard drive functions is essentially the biggest bottleneck in the overall speed performance of your computer i.e. you computer is only as quick as its slowest device. Numerous tests have demonstrated that certain computers boot up and operate twice as as quick when their conventional hard drives are replaced with sold state drives. Bring your computer to our workshop and we’ll replace your hard with a SSD and migrate your OS and all files to your new drive.

Drive Image Creation

When you get a new machine you may spend tens of hours installing patches and updates, installing service packs, installing unwanted software, installing and configuring 3rd party applications, updating device drivers, installing device drivers for external devices, customising the system. Once you’ve done all this you may want to create a drive image to give you a convenient restore point for the future. This restore point will become invaluable if you:

  • Upgrade to a bigger hard drive.
  • Replace the hard drive as your hard drive is no longer functional.
  • Want to go back to this restore point as your machine has become slow and cluttered over time.
  • Want to go back to this restore point as you have got a virus that it is proving too difficult to completely remove.

The process of restoring the drive image may only take 10 to 30 minutes, whereas re-installing windows and reconfiguring your complete system all over again could take you tens of hours.


If you would like assistance in creating a restore point for your machine please bring your machine to our workshop and we’ll create the drive image for you. This drive image should then be stored on 2 storage devices at any one point. We can even keep a copy of the drive image on our servers for you.

Hard Drive Re-partitioning

When you buy a computer the chances are that the hard drive will be configured with 1 single partition (the ‘C:’ drive). If this is the case all your user data (c:\users\[username]), application programs (c:\program files) and operating system files (c:\windows) will be stored on 1 single partition. However, it is more logical to split the drive into 2 partitions - c: for operating system files and application programs and d: for user data. This will allow you to logically separate the operating system (and installed applications) and your data files (documents, photos, movies, music etc). There are several reasons for doing this:

  • 1. It will give you the ability to exclude all your data files from the drive image when you create the drive image of the operating system (and installed applications).
  • 2. If you need to restore your computer to a previous restore point you don’t need to backup your data files prior to doing this (and restore them afterwards). You just simply restore the drive image to the c: drive in the knowledge that your data files will be untouched during the procedure (as they are stored on a different partition).
  • 3. You can save several drive image files (created on different periods) on the same hard drive (in D: drive) i.e. you don’t need to relocate the drive image files to another hard drive as these files will be excluded in the drive image creation process.

If you would like to split your hard drive into 2 logical partitions then please bring your computer to our workshop so that we can re-partition your hard drive for you.

Hard Dive Tune-up

Your computer’s RAM operates at far greater speed than your computer’s hard drive. The speed at which your hard drive functions is essentially the biggest bottleneck in the overall speed performance of your computer i.e. you computer is only as quick as its slowest device. If would like us to optimise the performance of your hard drive to ensure that the speed of your hard drive is no more of a bottleneck than it needs to be, then please bring your computer to us for a hard drive tune-up. The hard drive tune-up includes the following:

  • Hard drive performance test to ensure hard drive is functioning at the proper speed.
  • Hard drive low level (file system and hardware independent) physical surface scan to ensure there are no bad sectors
  • Re-partition your hard drive to separate the operating system / installed applications (C: OS-APPS) and your user files e.g. documents, music, videos, photos etc (D: DATASTORE).
  • Perform OS tweaks.
  • Perform hard drive cleanup and service pack cleanup.
  • Restore all user files onto DATASTORE partition.
  • Defrag & optimise page files and registry hives.
  • Turn off system restore
  • Perform hard drive file and directory size analysis to see if any unnecessary large files or directories can be deleted

Free 16GB USB Drive

We provide all customers with a complimentary 16GB USB flash drive.
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