Does anyone know what actually breaks when a hard drive fails?

Question

My macbook's hard drive has just died. It seems this is an all too common problem with macbooks and as everyone seems to go through the same sequence of events when the failure happens I just wondered what it is that actually goes wrong, and why. What is the ticking sound that I can now hear that wasn't there before? My Macbook sits on a cooling stand on my desk and hasn't been moved for weeks so why should it work one minute and die the next for no apparent reason? Could the heat that the current Apple Macbooks and MBP's generate be contributing to these failing hard drives? I have always felt that the high temperatures that the Macbooks work at can't be good for the internal parts, you would think that something would eventually fry or melt. If it is the heat that causes these failure then this is a serious issue as all the current Macbook line run very hot.

Answer 1

Apple uses the same drives as every other computer manufacturer. You mentioned that you upgraded to more RAM. That is one way to reduce the wear and tear on a hard drive. Unfortunately, as was mentioned, hard drives are remarkably complex devices. You have a platter spinning at 5400 or 7200 RPMs (that's 90 or 120 times a second ! ). You have a read head that is floating just a few air molecules above that super fast disk. Every year, hard drive manufacturers cram more and more data storage capability into less and less space. All things considered... hard drives are remarkably reliable. Unfortunately, as with all electronic devices (mechanical or solid state)... some are going to fail. There is simply no way around that with today's production technologies. The most important thing you can do is always keep a back up of your data on some form of external media.... be it a flash drive, CD/DVD, or an external hard drive. Hard drives are fairly inexpensive... and they are easy to replace in a MacBook. What is not so easy to replace (and in the case of business use... not so inexpensive) is your data. So long as you have your data backed up, a dead hard drive becomes nothing more than a minor inconvenience.