Why do hard drives fail? What causes disks to crash?
There are some obvious causes -- like fire or flood or a fall from a desk -- there are thousands of reasons. My brother-in-law once ran over his laptop while driving his Jeep. Miraculously, his hard drive survived -- though his screen did not.
Most reasons that hard drives crash are very complex.
Failures fall into four categories
-- and sometimes can be caused by a combination of these:
- Software corruption
- Firmware failure
- Electrical failure
- Mechanical failure
In order to understand even the simplest of them you have to learn the principles of how a hard drive works. |
