Virus causing hard drive damage??

[Sparticle]

My teacher was telling me about the computers at her house. She does alot of video editing, runs Raid 7 (i think it was 7), and has a Trillabite of combined hard drive space! I need to get me some of that!!

Anyway, she told me that a virus she recently got caused physical damage to her brand new hard drive. Most of the 300-ish-GBs are now busted for good. I have never heard of this before. I have to believe that she knows what she is talking about, but atn the same time I have trouble believing that software can cause physical damage to a hard drive.

Has anyone heard of this happening before, or is my teacher's hard drive ok?

 

[Lorand]

Theoretically it's possible. The hdd's head levitates above the disk surface due to the airflow caused by the spin of the disk. Suppose that there's a way controlling the disk's rotation speed. If the disk stops spinning, the head approaches the surface of it, eventually touching it. If then the hdd gets a command to seek to a certain sector the disk will be scratched.

But never heard of a virus that can do that...

 

[Sparticle]

Trillabyte...1024GB or fossil?

and has a Trillabite of combined hard drive space!

Woops...I accidentally called the 1024GB a trillabyte. It is really called a Terabyte. I must have confused it with a Trilobite, a sort of prehistoric crayfish-like thing.

 

[Christopher]

The hdd's head levitates above the disk surface due to the airflow caused by the spin of the disk. Suppose that there's a way controlling the disk's rotation speed. If the disk stops spinning, the head approaches the surface of it, eventually touching it. If then the hdd gets a command to seek to a certain sector the disk will be scratched.

Huh? The heads should never touch the disk at all, they're supposed to be about 50 nanometers above it. A hard drive is not always spinning, so if that was true, every time after you resume your computer after being idle you'd scratch your hard drives.

Modern hard drives should not be able to draw physical damage no matter what software. Maybe a couple a years ago, and even that is doubtful.

The virus probably just corrupted boot sectors or something and when Norton couldn't help her, she decided the hard drives were junked.

 

[Lorand]

When a hard disk is entering idle mode or at power-off first the heads are parked outside the magnetic media, only after then the disks stops spinning.
That's why power outages are dangerous - the heads can't manage to get parked, so bad sectors could appear.
And I agree, probably only the file system got really messed up on those hard drives. Once I had a problem with a hdd which was so screwed up due to bad RAM that even format won't work with it. The solution: low-level format. And that hdd is working fine ever since...