Then why do PCs let you check your SSD / HDD health and integral info through OS codes, while phones (Android based specifically) have no such commands ? Doesn’t it make more sense to include such things in phones since they hold sensitive personal data, and therefore are just as prone to data loss as PC hard drives ? (if not more, since you can’t just swap a phone’s storage unit if it starts to fail…)
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Hard disk health check things are a holdover from a time when solid state drives didn’t exist and disk based drives weren’t particularly reliable.
Disc based drives consist of a physical disk that spins around extremely rapidly while a small needle hovers extremely close to it without touching.
Back in ye olde days there were a lot of reliability issues with the bearing that held the disk in place, as well as the machinery that moved the needle around. It wasn’t unusual to get a drive whose disc had been scratched because it had been handled roughly. The most common failure mode was also that the bearing or needle assembly would go bad and begin nicking the disc.
Hard drive health tools were there to help you identify whether the issue with your brand new but under capacity disk was that it had been mislabeled or damaged in shipping. For older drives, it was a way to see if the disc nicking process had begun, which indicated that the drive itself was about to fail.
Modern disc drives don’t have those reliability issues. For a disc drive, the two most common failure methods are the motor dying or a capacitor on the drive’s control board blowing. Its similar for solid state drives – basically the only failure mode is a capacitor failing. A disc sector health scan doesn’t tell you anything about whether you’re nearing a failure.
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