what is the reason for a hard drive to die?

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kenny1999

Member
it is always said that any hard drives COULD fail at any time and we are always advised to make a backup of important files . Actually, what is usually the cause for a hard drive to die assume no accidents or physical impacts is going to be done to the hard drive?

How likely for a 3.5 Seagate or WD hard drive to die by 3 years and by 5 years?

I have got a number of hard drives and some of them are getting ''old'', but they still work perfectly for me. I don't know when they will die
 
In layman terms it would be because of physical moving parts. Then again everything does not have moving parts and are electronic and they wear out like a motherboard, memory or video card.
 
The tolerances in a mechanical hard drive are extremely tight. The heads don't touch the disk surface but fly just above it. If a tiny particle gets between the head and the disk surface then it will cause the head to crash and cause damage to the disk surface.

There's a whole myriad of reasons why a hard drive might fail. Heat, cold, vibration, humidity and so on all have an effect on a hard drive and too much of any of them can cause problems.

Ssds aren't immune to failure but should fare better due to no moving parts. Both mechanical and solid state drives are subject to failure of their electronic components or even a failure due to a problem in their firmware.

There is no accurate way to predict exactly when any given drive will fail. SMART data is an attempt to record data that may give an indication that a drive may soon fail but can't predict a drive's failure with 100% certainty.

Because of the uncertain nature of the life of any drive, it is imperative to keep it backed up or risk losing your data.
 
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