Will voltage surges cause hard drive crash?Can crashed drives be recovered?
Hard Drive crash means that the head which reads and writes data touches the platters in the drive unit. Though it is possible, it is highly unlikely because you dont give power directly to HDD from mains. The power to the HDD unit comes from SMPS, so there is some protection. However, extreme or continuous shock (that means a lot of vibration, which may be because you dropped it or use your PC very roughly) can cause head crashes more easily. Once the head in your hard drive crashes, it wont work. You can still recover the data, but to do that you need to dismantle the drive and read data off each platter separately in a sterile environment. This is not within the technological and economic reach of most people so for all practical purposes the data is lost. That’s why you should always maintain a backup copy of important data.
