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Your online IDs and Passwords are vulnerable to being lost and susceptible to hackers if you store them on your hard drive. But IDProtectu.com is accessed via the internet, instead of being loaded on your hard drive. Supervised servers, which are backed up daily and utilize all available security technologies maintain the software. The Hard (Drive) Facts In the United States, the number of personal computers (desktops and notebooks) in use for 2005 is estimated to be between 235 and 245 million. Personal computers account for 75% of all hard drives, so even assuming only one hard drive per computer, 300 million hard drives are presently in use in the USA alone. It is estimated that worldwide hard drive shipments in 2005 will be on the order of 400 million units, predominantly for computers, with a small but growing portion delivered to the consumer electronic industry. The main producers are Seagate, Fujitsu, Western Digital, Maxtor/Quantum, Hitachi/IBM, Toshiba and Samsung, together accounting for 98% of all shipments. Hard drives fail because of manufacturing related causes, obsolescence and because of human action. The manufacturing related failures are mainly: Human failures range from dropping the hard drive, dropping the notebook, kicking the computer, flooding the computer and almost any other cause you can imagine (and probably some you might never imagine). In some cases, the contents of the hard drive can be saved - either by specialized programs or by data recovery companies. The data recovery industry is enormous and that gives an indication to the problems existing with hard drives today. The cost of recovering data from a damaged hard drive is high, easily running at $1000 or higher for recoverable information. Generally the cheaper hard drives used in personal computers have a higher fail rate than more professional ones such as SCSI drives. The hard drive industry claims that hard drives have become more reliable over time, and that the major firms operate at a return rate (due to manufacturing defects) of less than 1%. However, manufacturers only get drives back within their warranty period, which for most manufacturers in the consumer market is 12 months. If the hard drive is one day past warranty, the manufacturers do not assist with troubleshooting. And hard drives generally are used well past the warranty period, with a greater chance of failing the older they get. For complete systems with a 2 or 3 year warranty, the manufacturer of the system takes the responsibility, not the hard drive manufacturer; and therefore problems for these systems are not included in their statistics. Also, manufacturers typically take back drives only for proven mechanical defects, not for other reasons. Research by IT professionals indicates that hard drive failures are a fact of life and can lead to major down time with computer systems, some 30% of which may take 24 hours or more to resolve. That down time comes at great cost to companies and users. As an owner of computer shops in the Tampa Bay, Florida area, I regularly compiled figures for returns relative to sales over the years. Hard drive returns (we tested each return before shipping back to manufacturers) were always in the 1-3% range, often running in certain batches of certain manufacturers, but comprising all the main manufacturers at one time or another. Well known also is the litigation against IBM, leading to compensation to users, for some of its Deskstar series, where it became clear that they kept producing the series despite mounting returns and internal reviews of manufacturing flaws It is therefore safe to assume that in 2005, 1% of all hard drives in use will fail. That means THREE MILLION hard drives in the USA. With notebooks now accounting for half of all personal computer sales, and being more prone to accidents, that figure of 3 million will effectively be even higher. Of course, you should always employ good computer practice, including backing up your files after each use, because your latest data will be the most important to you. Certainly if you were saving ID’s and Passwords to access your Internet accounts on your hard drive (and regularly changing, adding and deleting that information) you would need the latest data available. In practice, not many people, and not even many firms, back-up their data regularly. And this leaves such data at risk. For that reason and for the general reason of greater security against viruses, worms, hacker attacks, phishing via installation of a program on your computer, and so on, there is a movement to hold your data on secure servers, rather than on your desktop or notebook. Our program, IDProtectu.com, provides that secure ONLINE facility, instead of a software program on your hard drive. I use it to access my own online accounts and I know you’ll find it as safe and easy to use as I have. Cees A. Franken |
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