Causes of hard drives dying

In the past, a hard drive "crash" was often associated with the read/write heads on the hard drive physically "crashing" into the platter, thus scratching the platter and making it unusable. I understand that this can still happen every once in a while, but given that most people don't jar their hard drives around alot, this doesn't seem to be very common anymore.

Other things such as a piece of debris flying around inside the drive chamber, circuit failure, or a power surge sounds to me like much more likley causes of a hard drive going bad.

So, my question is, what are the more common causes?

I guess heat would be one.

My guess would be the failure of the read/write head actuator. Not that the heads hit the platter, but that actuator that moves the heads back and forth.

Quote:

---

Originally posted by lonewolfroger
I guess heat would be one.

---

Heat is one of the top reasons if you'd ask me. Quite a few recent cases have built-in Hard Drive vents/fans just for this reason.

I don't know if this falls under circuit failure, but the drive motor can also burn out.

I believe that bearing failure can cause the spinning platters to jiggle on their rotational shafts and thus wobble around a bit. Since the heads are only a few microns above the rotating platters, a small undesired wobble can cause the heads to strike the platter surface.

Seeing that drives are all electro-mechanical devices; Its usually the mechanical parts that fail. Bad bearings, actuators, and others become stressed from just plain old usage. Combine that with heat and you have an even shorter lifespan for all the mechanicals in a drive.