Apparently I overworked my iMac's hardrive, how can I prevent this in the future?

There really isn't a lot you can do to prevent hard drives from failing. They have moving parts and that means that they're very sustainable to failure. Backing up is very important.

Make sure that you have a good, reliable backup plan in place for your important data. You will certainly have another drive fail (if not more) in your lifetime. That being said, you can do a couple of things to make sure that your hard drive is as comfortable as possible: 1) Improve ventilation Make sure that your iMac isn't surrounded by a bunch of staks of paper and isn't right up against a wall.

The fans that Apple has built into the iMac do a very good job of circulating air, but they couldn't account for people putting things around the condensed units. If your iMac lives in a naturally warm place (like an attic), it wouldn't hurt to have a oscillating fan in the room that occasionally blows air past the iMac. 2) Don't smoke around the computer It's going to sound odd but the horrible yellow smoke that is left behind clogs computer components faster than you can say "no smoking".

The problem is that computers generate static electicity. Smoke is attracted to the inside of your computer because of the static electricity. When the smoke gets close enough to the components inside of your computer, it sticks and then is sealed onto the hardware with the heat that is naturally generated.3) Make sure that you have enough RAM Swap space works by moving data from your RAM to your Hard Drive and back again for quick and easy access to your data.

However, when you don't have enough RAM in your computer, more data is moved to the disk more often and as a result, your hard drive needs to work harder. So, sometimes simply adding another stick or two of RAM will help your hard drive and your productivity! I hope that this helps!

Hard drives that break or otherwise fail suck.

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