Why Do Hard Drives Fail?
Solution 1:
There is a good summary here.
The reasons include:
- Head crash, where the read-and-write head touches a platter.
- Faulty air filter, allowing dust to land on the platter
- Actual failure of the controller electronics.
- Mechanical failure or worn parts
So being knocked during shipping is a possible reason for disk failures, and prolonged use in intense conditions will cause wear to mechanic parts and dust getting in can cause a failure too.
The most likely cause of a disk failure if the disk is not defective in some way is just getting worn.
Solution 2:
Some causes for harddrive failure include:
- poor handling, e.g. impact, static electricity
- vibration
- high accelration
- overvoltage/power surge
- dust or other particular matter, e.g. metal filings
- rapid changes in temperature - I think EMC says more than 10C per hour temperature change - but check with your vendor
- plain old high temperature e.g. ambeint temp over 45degrees C or there abouts - check with - your vendor
- in the old days buggy drivers, but nowadays I believe the firmware/physical interlocks tends to prevent that - although I believe there has occasionally been buggy firmware released that has caused drive failure problems.
- faulty components/other manufacturing defect
You might find this paper interesting: http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf Basically some Google Sysadmin/SRE did some research into drive failures over a large population of drives (i.e. the google data centres).
Solution 3:
Bugged firmware: yes, like velociraptors. being bitten by that stupid thing at the moment. Have to change firmware on a dozen drives.