What does it mean when a hard drive has a “head crash”?
Hi, In a hard drive, you’ll find more than one rotating disk (called a platter) and more than one read/write head. When a hard drive is in normal working order, the read/write heads (the bits that read and write data from/to the platters) float close to the rotating platters. They don’t touch though. If you have a head crash, it means that one or more of the read/write heads has touched one or more of the platters, irreversibly damaging it. This is bad! You can usually get some data recovered by a specialist company, however this is extremely expensive, and is normally only done when the data on the drive needs to be used in a court case, or is worth lots of money. Hope this helps, Chris.
