[Context if needed on them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive), A few old ones I own stopped working due to their spin, and I’m curious to see why it happened to both of them
In: 3
Same reason a car stops working, wear and tear. Anything with mechanical movement will eventually wear out. That’s why SSD’s are much more reliable, they are solid state and don’t wear out.
The disks move around a spindle that is in the center of the disks. Any two things moving past each other like this will slowly wear against each other, just as water will slowly wear away stone.
Eventually, this wear is bad enough that something starts to rub seriously. Heat is generated and it gets worse fast. Soon there is enough wear that the surfaces do not move past each other at all and instead act like brakes.
At this point, everything seizes up and the disks will no longer spin.
Hard drives, even the old ones, are a marvelous feat of precision engineering made affordable only through the massive scale of their production.
Precision is a fundamental requirement that enables them to function in the first place, and it is provided, among other things, by a set of tiny bearings the spindle of the motor sits on.
With time, the ball bearings and the bearing races they run through experience wear and can no longer provide the tolerance required to keep the spinning disks stabilized in place. This eventually leads to repeat read/write head crashes, excessive vibration, ball bearings seizing after coming to a full stop and other things.
Some of these are direct mechanical malfunctions, others are conditions under which the drive can no longer perform its functions so the firmware just taps out.
Notably, while the old drive is running [and has potentially been running for the past 15 years] it’s in a state of mechanical equilibrium. Powering such an old drive down runs a serious risk of it not powering back on again.
Latest Answers