A Harddrive question
 

I am curious to know why a harddrive crashes??
And also, is there anything to do to prevent a crash?

Thanks a lot guys

I don't know of all the reasons, but its usually when the read/write heads come in contact with the platter surface.
If for example some dirt gets on the platter its enough to bridge the gap to the heads which when touching the surface will obviously damage it.

A high g'force impact can cause the heads to come into contact with the disk aswell. Other things that can cause a falure is a failure on the motor that controls the swing arm that has the read/write heads on it. If it gets stuck in a particular position then it wont be able to read the data on the disk.

A malfunction on one of the control chips or control circutry can also cause a disk to fail out of the blue.

So there is really nothing you can do to prevent it besides keeping you computer clean??
It can basically just happen whenever

In the old days, you could damage the HD by shutting down without "parking" the head. That shouldn't happen to new HDs although someone in the house did manage to cause a head crash on a maxtor 8G by switching off my PC while it was processing some video. So, things happen...

Also got 2 other broken maxtor when the bearing got worn out and started and started to corrupt the data.

My last seagate 40G got bad sector due to some seeking problem, at least that's what it seems like when I was looking at the SMART stat.

So, things happen, don't trust your HD, they can fail any day! Speaking of that, I should back up all my files to cdr and dvdr...