Power Surge Damages for Digital Storage Devices

What Is a Power Surge?

A power surge is talking about a sudden electric current spike of your home or office. Like the common instant power loss issue, it happens without any sign, doesn’t last long, but, still arouse damages to your appliances of your home or office. Moreover, if you are coincidentally using your digital storage devices, including some computer hard disks, external hard drives, USB flash drives, SD card or other memory cards, on your computer, the power surges also can corrupt your storage devices and bring your hard drive or memory card data loss troubles.

What Causes a Power Surge?

There are often two types of power surges: the internal power surges and external power surges.
The internal power surge, as the most commonly encountered type for people, often happen due to the high-power electrical devices, like elevators, air conditioners and refrigerators, etc, which can bring people an electric current spike when they are switched on or their motors are turned off. Why? When they are turned on or their compressors/motors are shut down, they will require a sudden and instant power to support the changing, which will also affect the stability of the voltage. That’s why the internal power surge occurs.
And the external power surge often happens for some natural reasons, like the lighting and thunders. That’s also why people are suggested to turn down all appliances before raining in the summer.

Power Surge Damage to Digital Storage Devices

Generally, though the internal power surges harms your appliances far less than the external power surges due to lightings or thunders, they also are able to damage or even corrupt your digital storage devices, like some commonly used USB hard disks, flash drives and memory cards, when they are still in use on your computer. Here, you will read some major damages that the power surges can cause for your storage devices:
1). A power surge can logically damage your Memory card, USB flash drive or computer hard disk.
An unexpected power surge can logically damage your attached memory card, USB flash drive and computer suddenly. After that power surge, if your storage device is really logically damaged, when trying it on your computer again, you often will be asked to format this device before any data access. Sometimes, when checking this memory card or USB drive in Disk Management or Properties interface, your will also find it is displayed as RAW, not the common NTFS or FAT32 format. Moreover, what’s worse, if you do coincidentally prepare no memory card or hard drive data backups elsewhere, it even can bring you more troublesome data loss problems.
Please Note: No matter what types of storage device data loss problems you’ve encountered, including not formatted drive or memory card data loss troubles, RAW format drive or memory card data loss troubles and more, recover hard drive or memory card with data recovery software before any format to avoid permanent data loss.
2). A power surge can physically damage your Memory card, pen drive or external HD.
And then, the bad news is that the sudden power surge also is able to physically damage or even corrupt your memory card, pen drive or external hard disk and cause permanent data loss.

How to Protect Hard Disk or Memory Card away from Power Surge Damages?

No matter whether you’ve ever experienced the power surges damages for your portable hard drives, thumb drives, SD cards, CF cards, memory sticks or memory cards, you’d better adopt some precaution measures to protect these devices away from the possible power surge damages. Here are some major measures for you to go on:
1). Purchase one, two or more powerful power surge protectors.
The power surge protectors are devices that are created for people to stable the electric current of your home or office and avoid sudden power surge damages to your appliances and digital storage devices. Simply get a proper one according to your own needs.
2). Back up your important hard disk or memory card data well on separate storage devices.
The power surges can damage hard disk or memory card and bring people data loss troubles, when people do save no extra device data on other drives or devices. Therefore, always prepare data backups well on separate storage devices to reduce chances of losing data.
3). Do not use computers and digital storage devices in a thunderstorm day.
As we’ve learned above, the thunder and lightings also can cause power surges and corrupt your digital storage devices. So, in the future, always avoid using your computer and devices in a thunderstorm day. If you really do have to use them for some urgent jobs or tasks, also remember to unplug your computer at first.

More Useful Tip about Power Surge Damages:

1). Data recovery Software is able to recover lost data from storage device when it is damaged for power surges.
Storage devices, like Micro SD cards, pen drives or removable hard disks, is damaged due to power surges and gives some not formatted error, RAW format device error or more errors? However, you also cannot format this device to erase everything inside? All right! In this case, data recovery software is what you are looking for. With a proper data recovery program, you can easily recover memory card or hard drive photos, videos, documents, messages, texts, mails, songs and more back before you format this device to fix its possible problems.
2). Solutions to restore the common use of the computer drive or memory card damaged by power surges.
As with these internal/external hard drives, flash drives or memory cards logically damaged by power surges, as you’ve been told above, you can easily format them to restore their common use after you do have recovered your desired information back. But, as with some storage devices that have been seriously damaged, take it to some shops and ask some experts for help.

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