What Happens When the Hard Drive Crashes?
You may never experience an actual hard drive crash but if you do you will undoubtedly know what has happened. Of all the computers I have owned I have never had a “real” hard drive crash. I have had my computer crash but not from a hard drive failure. I have recently worked on at least two different laptops than had hard drive failures and the only way for a repair was hard drive replacement.
Let us take a look at what actually happens when a hard drive crashes. In a recent article I referred to the distance between the platter and the read/write head and it is a matter of NM’s (Nanometers) above the platter. When you think about this thickness, a sheet of paper can be thicker than the distance between the platter and the read/write head. This is the reason for being careful of how we treat the computer and not be rough when moving it etc. another item of harm is dust and grit. The hard drive is somewhat sealed but things can happen and dirt can sometimes get into the hard drive itself. Recently I got a laptop to work on and when I plugged it in and turned it on you could hear the hard drive grinding against things it was not supposed to be touching. I knew without looking the hard drive was history; however, I still took it apart to investigate further.
Sometimes part of the data can be recovered but often it is not, whatever was being written at the time and all of the past memories on the drive may be lost forever. But what actually happened? The platter is certainly not indestructible and scratches can occur and dropping the computer may in fact cause extreme damage to the drive. Because the platter is spinning so fast when it comes in contact with something it should not, bad things are going to happen and it may be lost forever. This is a good reason for backup plans but like any good business plan, the backup plan must be before it is needed. An extra hard drive could be the solution and if it is setup as a RAID1 it will be a redundant copy of everything on the drive. If you have a RAID0 extra drive installed the data is alternated between drives so only part of your material would be lost or you could have a good external hard drive where data is backed up on a routine basis to secure at least a part of your data. I have my external set to backup every Saturday morning
