If you have been using computers for longer than a couple of years, it’s likely that you have experienced a hard drive failure at one point or another. Hard drives are by far the most common point of failure in a computer, and here at Small Dog, we see multiple computers with failing hard drives every day.
Hard drives are so failure-prone because of the way that they are built. If you imagine a record player, spinning thousands of times per minute and packed into the space of a couple of inches, you have a good idea of what the inside of a hard drive looks like. Modern hard drives also have multiple disks and read/write arms stacked on top of one another, to increase storage capacity.
With all of these tiny moving parts, functioning at high speed, it’s easy to see why hard drives fail so often. Over time, the moving parts will just wear out until they can no longer spin or are no longer aligned correctly. Hard drives are also extremely sensitive to movement, especially sudden movement. If a hard drive is dropped or impacted, it is likely that the tiny read/write arms will scratch the surface of the disks where the precious data is stored. This can cause data to become unreadable, or the computer to stop working entirely.
More and more computers are now being built with solid-state drives instead of hard drives. Solid-state drives are a newer technology that requires no moving parts at all, storing all of its information inside electronic circuits. This lack of moving parts causes solid-state drives to be much faster and more reliable than hard drives. Solid-state drives can decrease startup times to a few seconds, and are much less likely to be damaged by sudden impacts than hard drives are.
The only downside to solid-state drives is the high cost per gigabyte. All new MacBooks, MacBooks Air and MacBooks Pro are built with a solid-state drive installed, starting at 128 gigabytes. I often see people confused by this, because their older computer had a much higher storage capacity than their brand new one. In most cases, the tradeoff for better speed and reliability is worth the capacity downgrade.