5 Tips for Reviving Your Drives

How you can keep your drives healthy and always ready for action

Legacy Content

This article may reference older System Mechanic^® features that have been replaced or enhanced in the current version.

The thing about your hard drive is, it works hard but it’s not always forthcoming when it has problems. In fact, your hard drive may start acting up without any warning–and depending on how much you’ve worked it–it might just go kaput on you. Same goes for SSDs (Solid State Drives). With regular maintenance, you can prevent drive degradation and PC performance gridlock with the tools in System Mechanic and keep your drives alive and kicking for the long haul.

The Drive Doctor Is In: Prevent corruption and prevent potential crashes.
Streamline Your Files: Remedy performance gridlock due to fragmented files.
Order in the Court: Write files more efficiently to speed up your PC’s response.
Solid-State-Of-The-Art: Keep your SSDs lasting longer and at maximum potential.
Look Inside Your Drive: Get a report on your hard drive’s health and operating status.

Tip 1

The Drive Doctor Is In: Hard drives can accumulate data corruption through daily wear and tear, potentially leading to data loss or even system failure. Use System Mechanic’s Drive Medic to find corruption and prevent potential crashes.
Here’s how:

Start System Mechanic and click Toolbox » Individual Tools » Repair Problems
Find Drive Medic within Repair Problems and click the Start button next to Repair Hard Drive Problems
Follow the on-screen instructions, using the Help button for further info as needed

Note: Hard drives can accumulate data corruption through daily wear and tear, potentially leading to data loss or even system failure. Use System Mechanic’s Drive Medic to find corruption and prevent potential crashes.

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Tip 2

Streamline Your Files:Through everyday use your files get broken up and stored in pieces all over the drive. Remedy this performance gridlock in a few steps using System Mechanic’s automatic defragmenter.
Here’s how:

Start System Mechanic Pro and click Toolbox » Individual Tools
Find Drive Accelerator within Maximize Performance and click the Start button next to Defragment Hard Drives
Select the drive(s) you want to optimize and click Next
Select your options and click Next to start the defragmentation processNote: Defragmentation can take a while on larger hard drives (up to several hours). You can use your PC during defragmentation, or you can start the process before leaving the office or going to bed.
Congratulations, your system is now defragmented and ready for actionNote: If you elected to have any locked files defragmented next time Windows starts, these files will be optimized when you restart your PC.

Bonus Tip: You can easily turn on automatic defragmentation. Go to Automated Tasksunder ActiveCare, then enable Automatically optimize system drive.

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Tip 3

Order in the Court: Almost everything you do on your PC causes data to be written to the hard drive, and this data scatters into fragments that downgrade performance. Prevent this fragmentation and performance slump with System Mechanic’s AcceleWrite.

Here’s how:

Start System Mechanic and click LiveBoost » Configuration
Scroll down to AcceleWrite and make sure it is Enabled
Your files will now be written to disk in batches to prevent them from fragmenting

Note: AcceleWrite also works on Solid State Drives (SSDs).

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Tip 4

Solid-State-Of-The-Art: Solid state drives (SSDs) don’t suffer from fragmentation like mechanical hard drives but they still degrade with everyday use. SSD Accelerator’s unique technology helps your SSD stay at maximum potential.

Here’s how:

Start System Mechanic and click Toolbox » Individual Tools » Maximize Performance
Find SSD Accelerator and click Start next to Maximize Solid-State Drive Speed
Follow the on-screen instructions, using the Help button for further info as needed

Note: The SSD Accelerator tool applies to Windows 7, Vista and XP.

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Tip 5

Look Inside Your Drive: Get an instant report on your hard drive’s health and operating status with System Mechanic’s DriveSense tool.

Here’s how:

Start System Mechanic and click Toolbox » Individual Tools » Perform Diagnostics
Find DriveSense and click Start
System Mechanic will inspect the hard drives on your system and display a list
Click the [+] next to any hard drive to get more details
For more info on the drive attributes System Mechanic monitors, click Help

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