15 November 2010
Being a data recovery company, we’re all too well aware that hard disks are by no means 100% reliable and fail safe. Most hard drive manufacturers quote the reliability of their drives in terms of ‘Mean Time Between Failure’ (MTBF for short).
Most older hard drives had a MTBF of between 20,000 and 50,000 hours (roughly between 800 and 2000 days) of continuous use before they could be expected to fail, whereas more modern drives are quoted at somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 hours, a vast improvement but still not completely failsafe.
With a head crash problem the damage to the disk is normally both considerable and permanent
Causes of a Head Crash?
So, apart from simply wearing out, what are some of the other main causes of hard drive failure?
Physical knocks are probably the most common cause of faulty hard drives that we come across, typically if the computer gets a knock or jolt whilst it is powering up, the disk’s head can make contact with the surface of the disk, scraping off some of the coating from the disk’s tracks. In these scenarios (referred to as a ‘head crash’), the damage to the disk is normally both considerable and permanent. In worst case scenarios, if the head crash occurs whilst the drive’s head is positioned above the drive’s specified system areas (e.g. Master Boot Record and DOS Boot Record), then the entire disk can be rendered unusable.
This kind of problem tends to be more common with portable systems like laptops, netbooks and external hard drives (normally after they have been dropped), but still occurs with standard PC systems too.
If you suspect that your hard drive may have suffered a head crash, or any other kind of failure, do not use it, get in touch with a professional data recovery company, such as Kingdom Data Recovery, who have the specialist technology required to rescue your files and data from the drive.
