Will audio files kill my hard drive?

Question: If I use my new iMac mostly for home studio recording, will the extra burden on its hard drive shorten the computer's lifespan? What other risk factors should I worry about?

  • A MacBook Air on display at an Apple store in San Francisco.

    Jeff Chiu, AP


Jeff Chiu, AP


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Answer: Saving and editing audio requires writing a great deal of data to a computer's hard drive and reading it back, but even a computer used for little more than Web browsing and e-mail will run up read/write cycles.

For that, you can credit "virtual memory": the practice of using a portion of the hard drive to supplement a computer's memory.

Modern operating systems manage this so artfully that you shouldn't notice that data is being "paged" from RAM to disk and back all the time — unless things get so overloaded that the computer starts thrashing, essentially grinding its gears as it struggles to keep enough memory free.

So I don't expect that using a computer as a home studio — or for video editing, another data-intensive proposition — would make a meaningful difference in the drive's lifespan.

But if you keep a laptop or desktop long enough — or you're just plain unlucky — the hard drive probably will die before any other component. It's a tiny mechanical device packed with precision-engineered parts that must function within precise tolerances, and eventually some will break.

(You've backed up your data lately, right? On a Mac, use Apple's Time Machine with any external drive; on a PC, go with the backup software Microsoft built into Windows Vista and in Windows 7.)

Replacing a drive can be a five-minute procedure, unless it's not. On my year-old ThinkPad, I only have to undo a handful of screws to unplug the drive. (I've already had to do that once — not to swap out the drive, but to replace the keyboard). On my iMac, I hope I never have to try: It apparently involves removing the entire screen, and then things get even more interesting.

On smaller laptops such as the MacBook Air, solid-state flash memory has replaced the hard drive. "Solid-state drives" (SSDs) are not just less fragile but are also faster, smaller and consume less electricity.

As the price of flash memory keeps dropping, I expect that trend to accelerate — the odds of me buying another laptop with a hard drive are approaching zero, and I wouldn't be too shocked if my next desktop ships with an SSD as well.

To me, the biggest risk factor for a computer's early demise is not the programs it runs but whether it's a laptop. Portable computers get bumped and dropped all the time. Their screen hinges can start to weaken over time. Spilling a Coke in a desktop keyboard only takes out the keyboard; on a laptop, the motherboard lies underneath it. Plus, laptops are far easier to lose through oversight or theft.

(You've backed up your data lately, right?)

Tip: Don't bother with a camera's USB cable

For the first few years of their existence, the only way to get a photo from most digital cameras to a computer was to connect it with whatever data cable came in its box. (One exception: a line from Sony that used floppy disks for storage. Anybody remember those — no, not floppies, the cameras?)

Then, however, computer manufacturers got in the habit of including slots for the memory cards used by cameras — although Apple's 11-inch MacBook Air remains a notable exception. It helps that after years of pointless disagreement, camera vendors finally standardized on the SD Card format.

Those two changes have basically eliminated the need to use a camera's USB cable — too often, with some weird proprietary plug instead of the micro-USB format used on most mobile devices. So if you still find yourself reach for one to transfer pictures, please break yourself of that habit.

Note to camera vendors: If you want to make the camera's cable relevant again, let users recharge a camera's batteries by connecting it with that cable to any computer or USB-compatible charger.



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