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Why does a Hard Disk Go Bad? Why are People Shocked When the Disk Crashes?
A hard disk failure, contrary to what people would like to think, is very common. A hard disk failure might come unannounced i.e. your system just crashes without warning, or the hard disk failure might announce its arrival by making strange sounds in your system. Many people are found questioning themselves and recollecting what they could have done wrong to contribute to the hard disk crash. The answer to this quandary is “absolutely nothing”.
Recent studies prove that approximately 44% of the data loss is due to hardware failure. A hard disk can go bad even when you are proceeding with using your computer as per your daily routine, or doing nothing out of ordinary. However, it might also crash due to an internal or external factor. Hard drive contains many electronic circuits, semiconductors, and other components. Failure of any of these components can result in a hard disk failure. Most common type of hard disk crash is a “Head Crash” wherein the magnetic surface gets grinded away because of the internal read and write head touching a disk platter.
Hard disk technology and our chances of encountering a hard drive failure share a positive correlation. As the technology improvements increase, our chances of encountering a hard drive crash also increase. With the improvements in technology, to address our need to read and write at a faster rate, the hard disks rotate very fast with immense force. Due to this, any external or internal disruption can cause severe damage to the hard disk. Most people do not realize that a hard disk crash can happen to anyone. People usually do not take into account certain facts about hard disk failures. Seldom are people aware of the fact that any form of physical jolt to your computer system increases your chances of hard disk failure. Hard drives are made of miniscule pieces and are very prone to damage since these pieces work very closely together. Most people are also very complacent about creating data backups only to realize that they are in the middle of a data loss crisis. In addition, people do not perform a restore to check if the backup system is working as expected. Let us understand what type of hard disk failures can people encounter.
A Guide to Understanding the Types of Hard Disk Failures
It is important to understand the nature of a failure while diagnosing a hard drive crash. Failures are of two types, physical failures and logical failures. A physical hard disk failure can be described as a failure when the failure of the hard drive is of physical nature i.e. you might hear certain sounds or if the computer does not detect the hard drive, whereas a logical hard disk failure is a type of failure wherein the hard drive is not physically damaged but the information stored on the hard drive has gone bad. Let us understand each type of failure in more detail.
Firmware corruption is one of the reasons why a hard disk goes bad. A firmware is an embedded code that controls the basic functions of a hard drive. The firmware can become corrupt which can lead to your hard disk becoming unreadable or make your computer ineffective in interacting with the hard disk. How do you know if the hard disk has failed due to firmware corruption? You might hear the hard disk spin when you power on your computer but you get an error message from your computer, or your computer might hang during boot up.
Your hard drive can also fail due to an electronic failure. An electronic failure can be caused by power fluctuations, which can affect the controller board of the hard disk. The controller board then affects the hard disk, making the hard disk undetectable to the BIOS.
Mechanical failure might be another reason for your hard disk failure. As mentioned before, a hard disk consists of miniscule moving components that can create problems when they are disturbed or when these parts get some kind of defect. Mechanical failures of the hard disk will make the data on the hard drive inaccessible. How do you get to know if your hard disk has encountered a mechanical failure? You can get to know if the hard disk failure is of a mechanical nature if you hear a regular ticking or clicking sound upon powering your hard drive.
A logical failure is said to have occurred if there is nothing physically wrong with your hard drive. A logical error should not be undermined because whereas some errors can be very simple such as an invalid entry in a file allocation table, there are other errors that can cause severe problems.