Hard drives are one of the most important components in a computer. They are the devices that store your information, pictures, music, movies and emails. While they are engineered extremely well, they do occasionally fail.
What makes a hard drive fail?
A media failure happens if a drive is handled roughly causing the disk to be physically scratched. If this has happened, there may be ways to recover your data, however you should consider how much the data is worth to you, as this can cost quite a bit of money.
The head failure happens when the read/write head (the arm in the hard drive) touches the platters (disk). Often times data will be permanently lost if this has occured.
Mechanical failures are the most common failures to occur. The motor burns out, the drive overheats, the bearings wear out. These errors are usually due to the drive being past it’s life cycle (we recommend drive replacement every 3 years. Anything after that tends to be borrowed time.)
Signs a drive is going to die.
Drive failures can be one of the most tragic things to happen to a user, and unfortunately, sometimes drives just die with no way to see it coming, however they will happen. This should illustrate the importance of backups.
Backups are far less costly than data loss. And one should not count on data being recovered from a failed hard drive. Often times