Shaking. Various jolts and shakings happen frequently during notebook transportation and active work. This expedites deterioration of the mechanical parts of a hard drive.
Insufficient power supply. When powered by the battery, the notebook hard drive might not get sufficient power because of excessive battery load. In this case the hard drive will not be able to maintain constant rotation speed which increases the probability of information loss.
High temperature. Heat emission of components of modern notebooks may reach 100 watts. And all those components are located in a small area with weak cooling. In such a harsh environment hard drive temperature is often close to or even exceeds the maximum allowed value (55°C (131°F) for most hard drives). This negatively affects both mechanical (thermal expansion of the platters) and electronic (overheating and possible failure of the controller) parts of a hard drive.
That?s why notebook hard drives need constant health monitoring to prevent data loss. Such monitoring can be performed with Hard Drive Inspector Professional (HDIP). But the Professional version is intended mostly for desktop computers and doesn?t take into account some peculiar features of notebooks. For example, HDIP periodically reads S.M.A.R.T. data from a hard drive to control its health. Reading this data when the hard drive is in sleep mode activates the disk which in turn causes an unnecessary increase in power consumption and reduces battery life. In addition, the average working temperature of a notebook's hard drives is usually higher than the temperature of a desktop?s disks. So, when used in notebooks, HDIP may show false overheating alerts.