I’ve had my share of painful Hard Drive moments so ill save the horror stories and get to the point.

If you are using a "Hard disk recording system" (i.e. Pro Tools) your "hard drive" is one of the most important components of your system.

So here are a few helpful tips in hard drive maintenance:

1. I suggest you have have at least three hard drives.  One should serve as your primary "project" work drive, one for backup, and one for samples libraries and virtual synths.   You will want a "brand name" drive spinning at a minimum of 7200RPM.   I suggest Avid "Quiet Drive" or anything Glyph technologies makes.
2. Backup and Defrag the drives OFTEN. When purchasing a backup drive(s), I tend to stay with the same manufacturers  as my work and sample drive.  Every so often, I suggest you defrag your work drive.  This will keep your work drive working optimally.  You heard me right, back it up , format it (erase it) then restore the data from the backup drive.
3. Check out cool disk drive apps.  If you are using a Mac,  check out an application  called "Disk Warrior" (Alsoft).  I've used it and it lives up to its process "DiskWarrior is the safest, most technologically advanced, most powerful utility to eliminate directory damage available for any computer."

Have fun creating.