How does a hard drive fail?
How do I find out the reason? How do I find out why the machine is broken?
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Drives fail from many causes!
First off are we talking about a true Hard Drive which is a can with a bunch of spinning platters (HDD) or are we talking about a Solid State drive (SSD) people often use the term Hard Drive for either.
HDD's are sensitive to sudden hard movements that can cause the delicate head skating across the spinning disks to jam into them what we call a hard crash. Here the head assembly would need to be replaced which is expensive and really only an option when the data on the drive was not backed up and critical.
Age and the environment is also factor as the motor which spins the disks and the bearings can fail. Dry, hot or dust can shorten the drives life
SSD's are much more durable that a HDD and don't have moving parts, but the size of the drive and how much is stored on it can affect its lifespan. A small sized drive 128GB as an example that is better than 75% full can run into issues as the OS (drives firmware) may get into problems with data churn! As the available unused space may become over used, this was an issue in early drives and OS which did't use TRIM as well as have over allocation so a bad worn block could be locked out and a spare used in its place.
A bit more on Data Churn!
SSD's do better when 1/4 to (1/2 on smaller drives) is left unused so the OS and the drives firmware have plenty of elbow room! More so when you have a lot of changing data. Now a single drive which holds everything won't last as long and could put your data at risk! Which is why Pro's use a dual drive setup! One to be the boot drive with the OS and the Apps and lot of room for virtual RAM and paging. Then the Second drive holds your data which is more stable (not churning at the same level).
Some Pro's and serious amateurs even get into RAID setups to reduce the risk of data loss or leverage a backup service online (your internet connection may limit you and if they encounter a problem you could loose your stuff or get corrupted) this is where a good setup can make a difference.
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