What You Should Know About Storage Drivers

Every computer has internal storage or it uses a remote storage device, such as a universal serial bus (USB) drive, hard disk drive or external hard drive. Either way, your computer needs to have certain drivers to allow the communication to happen between the storage device and the computer, which is done through storage drivers. Storage drivers are software downloaded and installed on your computer that allow the interaction between storage and computer. If you plug in a USB drive to the computer and a box pops up letting you look through the data on that USB drive, this is done with the help of storage drivers. If you did not have the storage drivers intact, you would be unable to access any data on the drive.

Updating Your Storage Drivers

Storage drivers need to be updated for a variety of reasons. There might be revisions released by the manufacturer due to recent changes or upgrade, updates to your computer o operating system might require updates to the drivers, or some of the storage drivers might be corrupt. Generally, you don’t realize you need these updates until you try to use or access the storage disk or device and you aren’t able to. Other times, you receive an error message specifically stating the drivers are outdated. This is helpful because it typically tells you what drivers need to be updated and where they can be found. If you’re not sure which ones, try going to the manufacturer’s website and looking for any recent updates or downloads.

Keep in mind that you will need to do a system restore point or a system back up before you download and install these storage drivers, or any drivers to your system. If there is something corrupt in the file or if anything goes wrong in the download or install your system could be at risk. By having a back up or restore point you can take your system back to how it was prior to the download or install, saving you immense time and effort “righting” your computer again.

Sources:

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/update-drivers-computer.htm

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/what-is-a-driver