Hot little Hard Drive...

Solid State Hybrid Drives for Laptops SSHD—The Fastest Way To Have It All...

Hybrid Hard Drive Performance: Thin, Thinner and Thinnest...

For you smart ones out there that held onto their Windows 7 laptops and are ready to upgrade your hard drive, this is the way to go...
http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/solid-state-hybrid/laptop-solid-state-hybrid-drive/?cmpid=ppc-_-SSHD-_-G-_-us

Okay, so how this new hard drive thing works is like this...

1. The Hard Drive that I spoke about in my blog is a really fast drive and is about 60.00 more than a drive you could get.
    1a. Example 60.00 drive 5400 rpm, 129.00 drive is 5x faster :-) that's REALLY REALLY FAST!!!
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/momentus-xt-750gb-review,3223-3.html

2. In order to determine if you have a bad drive depends on a few things.
    2a. Age of the computer. A desktop/server drive life is about 6 years, but can go longer if it was in a perfect environment 10 years is about tops.
    2b. Laptop drives are anywhere from 1 day to 10 years.
    2c. "Hard drives are essentially metal platters with a magnetic coating...ssd drives (expensive drive) are: Instead of a magnetic coating on top of platters, the data is stored on interconnected flash memory chips that retain the data. Flash memory in SSDs is faster and more reliable than the flash memory in USB thumb drives."

Now they say that SSD Drives will last longer than platter drives, but so far I have read mixed reviews and they haven't been "practically" used for 10 years yet...
---- Introduction 1950's practical use 2009 and very expensive. Just recently the prices have come down and people are starting to buy them like magnetic drives used to be bought.

3.  Defraggler or a Defragging software in general will determine whether or not your drive is in need of replacement. Just open Defraggler, (update if need be) then on the home page (Drive C:) you'll see status then ready and under ready you'll see "Disk Health" and there it will tell you good, bad or excellent.

4. Sometimes software like defraggler isn't always the best, so we use a PC Check software that will also determine the status on a read and write. A more thorough test.

5. Other signs of a bad hard drive is just everything seems so slow when you type/save, read or scroll. That's the read/write functionality you do on a daily basis. This is hard to determine sometimes, because it can also be a Memory issue or a Board/SW Issue, so not 100% determination...

The final analysis is based upon an algorithm of sorts,
- example. (rule of thumb) The Infamous Indy 4th Row explained, by Asus Al ;-) or the: Should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one - That's the replacement value compared to upgrade value.

If you think you could use that Win7 system until 2021 and all you have to do is buy a new drive and repair cost. 60.00-130.00 HD, plus friend pricing, 50.00 or retail 150.00 worse case scenario...280.00 best 110.00 :-) then go ahead!
...new computer 600.00 and UP!

You could go to Linux and choose different desktops and distros.

Preventive maintenance like blowing the dust out and keeping up with your updates and malware and you should be good! You never know :-)

You also have to look at where we are with Technology.

1. We are at portable!

2. We are going towards another version of an OS.

3. I am recommending going to Win 10 which should be 64x :-P

4. Portable is cheap enough and learning can be fun when you don't have to rely on it ;-)

From what I read and heard is that Windows will start doing version upgrades once a year compared to what they have done in the past with naming XP, Vista etc.. more number and maybe a monthly/annual subscription fee :-(

If your company is saying that you should go to what is out there now say, it's either Macintosh or Win 7, Linux or NOTHING! or if it's just for fun ANYTHING!

This is a rough outline, but thorough enough to determine the future of your device and the money in your savings account ;-)...and that's a fact!