Hard Drive Failures : Causes and Difference from Magnetic and Flash Drives

Hard drive crashes are one of the most frustrating experiences with a computer. The inability to read data from the hard drive can render a computer useless. Even if the OS can run, the data may be inaccessible or damaged. The only way to recover from such a failure is to typically restore data from a backup onto a new drive with all the software installed from scratch. If no backup is available, then the data is either lost or will cost a lot for recovery services to retrieve.

From the above case, to retrieve the lost or damaged data from the magnetic hard disk is not at all easy. But in the case of Flash as a main memory, to retrieve the lost data is simple using some recovery software’s compare to the old one.Here some discussion takes place at what causes hard drive failures and how that causes differ from flash and magnetic hard drives.

Common drive failures

The most common failure for a magnetic hard drive is head crash. A head crash is any instance where the drive head manages to touch a platter. When this happens, the magnetic media will be etched off of the platter by the head and render both the data and the drive head inoperable. There is no clean recovery from such a failure. But in Flash based hard Disk doesn’t contain any head and motors. So no need to worry about these problems in flash hard disks.

Another common failure comes from imperfections on the magnetic media. Any time that a sector on the disk fails to properly hold the magnetic alignment will cause data to be inaccessible. Typically drives will have a few of these located on the platter, but they are marked out of use by a low level format from the manufacturer. Later low level formats can be done to mark sectors as unusable so they will not be used, but this is a long process that erases all data from the drive. But Flash contain semi conductor based memory not a magnetic based, this type of failure comes very rarely in flash.

Mobile systems tended to be prone to platters that shattered. This was due to the fact that most hard drive platters are made of glass and was susceptible to shock. But flash contains high shock resistance.

MTBF:

In order for consumers to get a good idea of the lifespan of a hard drive; a drive was rated by MTBF. This term stands for Mean Time Between Failure and is used to represent the length of time that 50 percent of drives would fail before and 50 percent would fail after. It is used to give an idea to a buyer as to the average amount of time the device will function for.

The “Mean Time Between Failures” (MTBF) for hard disc drives had been going up fairly steadily from around 200,000 hours in the 1990’s to nearly 1,200,000 hours today. But the Solid-state drive is going to be orders of magnitude faster than any hard disc drive; the MTBF of nowadays flash is 2,000,000 hours (Example SanDisk).

Recovery Software:

At the time of hard drive failures, user wants to recover all data from that failure hard disk. So many recovery software are there for both magnetic and flash drives. But here compare to magnetic hard disk recovery, the flash one is very easy, time consuming and low cost too.