HD Doctor Blog

What are the common Reasons of Hard Disk Drive failure?

1. Electronic Component Failure
2. Motor Failure
3. Read / Write Head Failure
4. Media Damage
5. Firmware Corruption
6. Logical Failure

One or all of the above primary causes may be evident when diagnosing a failed hard disk drive.

Electronic Component Failure

Electronic components may fail due to voltage transients, heat or poor handling. Substitution, repair and re-programming is generally required in order to recover data stored on the hard disk. PCB assemblies are however hyper tuned at the manufacture stage and specialist re-programming and calibration is subsequently required to restore the hard disk to a working condition.

Motor Failure

Hard disk motor spindles…

GB (Gigabyte)
One gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 (one billion) bytes or 1000 (one thousand) Megabytes.

Jumper
In EIDE drives, a jumper is an electrically-conductive component that you place over pairs of pins that extend from the circuit board on the hard drive jumper block to connect them electronically. For example, a jumper is one way to designate a hard drive as master or slave. The jumper block is located next to the 40-pin connector on the hard drive.

Just-in-time (JIT)
A production and inventory control process in which components and materials are delivered to an assembly point as needed. This process is used in many hard drive manufacturing facilities.

Kilobyte (KB)
1024 bytes, although it often considered…

Survey data from companies that specialize in data recovery may be used to investigate the primary causes for how data actually gets lost.

Hard drive failure is the most common cause of data loss, accounting for 38 percent of data loss incidents.

Drive read instability includes occasions where media corruption or degradation prevents access to the data on a disk. This explains 30% of lost data.

Software corruption, which might include damages caused by system software or other program (e.g., a virus attack), accounts for 13 percent of data loss incidents.

User error accounts for 12 percent of data loss episodes. This includes the accidental deletion of data as well as incorrectly partitioning the hard drive.…

Winchester Disk
Former code name for an early IBM hard disk model, sometimes still used to refer to the technology and design of most traditional hard drives.

Windows
Microsoft’s series of operating systems for personal computers. Currently popular versions are Windows 95 and Windows 98.

Word
Two bytes that are processed together in a single operation.

Workstation
A personal computer with exceptional capacity and performance capabilities for use mainly in engineering, design and audiovisual applications demanding immediate access to data and the ability to manipulate it in technically sophisticated ways.

Write
The recording of flux reversals onto the magnetic surface of a disk.

Write Cache
High speed RAM used to buffer data…

Virus Scanner
Software that is used to scan for and eradicate computer viruses, worms, and Trojan horses.

Viterbi Detection
An algorithm used in read channel technology that detects an entire sequence of data bits at a time and determines the most likely sequence of data bits by comparing actual sequence of data bit samples with sequences of possible data bit sample to accurately detect that data written to disk.

Voice Coil
An actuator motor; the force of the magnetic rotary voice coil produces a movement of the head that is proportionate to the force exerted by the coil.

Volume
A portion of a physical disk that functions as though it were a physically separate disk.

Ultra SCSI
Provides 20 MB/s transfers over an 8-bit bus or 40 MB/s transfers over a 16-bit Wide SCSI bus. Also known as Fast-20 SCSI, this feature is most commonly found in SCSI-3 drives.

Ultra DMA/33
A high-speed host data transfer feature that transfers data at 33.3 MB per second.

Un-correctable Error
An error that cannot be overcome using Error Detection and Correction.

Unformatted Capacity
The total number of usable bytes on a disk, including the space that is required to record location, boundary definitions, and servo data. (See also formatted capacity.)

Universal Serial Bus (USB)
A serial bus with a bandwidth of 1.5 megabits per second (Mbps) for connecting peripherals to a microcomputer. USB…

TPI (Tracks per inch)
The number of tracks written within each inch of the disk’s surfaces, used to measure how closely the tracks are packed on a disk surface. Also known as track density.

Tagged Queuing
The ability of the drive to receive multiple I/O processes from each initiator.

Task File
The set of I/O Host Interface Registers used to transfer status, commands, and data between the host and the drive for the EIDE interface.

Thin Client Architecture
A computer system in which data is stored centrally, with only limited storage capacity at the various points of use.

Thin Film
A type of coating deposited on a flat surface through a photolithographic process. Thin film…