Do Not Walk the Laptop

After the touchpad mouse failure (overuse and abuse) and the keyboard failure (accidental food spillovers), one of the most common failures in a laptop is the hard disk failure.

A quick survey using Google tells us that there are nearly a million results for laptop hard disk, about a half million each for laptop hard disk recovery and laptop hard disk replacement, and a quarter million for laptop hard disk failure.

Let us look into mechanical hard disk failures as there are recovery tools which can very well work in case of other kinds of failures.

One obvious reason why a hard disk might mechanically fail is when it is dropped off a height. Despite what stress tests assure you, laptops are only as proportionally safe as humans when it comes to jumping off heights. While we might be able to walk again, they might not always be able to run.

One non-obvious reason why a hard disk might mechanically fail is when you take it for a walk. Laptop is a portable device, so you hold it and walk from the kitchen (it shouldn’t even have been there) to the TV room, or worse, from your office to your home. I do it all the time. Only I suspend the laptop, if not shut it down.

Hard disks as the “disk” suggests are mechanical devices. When you walk a hard disk while it is running (while I/Os are being performed), you put it in a pickle, like you would yourself find when you were to drink while running.

The large momentum you give it while walking can conflict with its own momentum at a time when its head is trying to read or write to a sector, and this can cause mechanical failure.

So.

Don’t walk the laptop.

Not when it is running. Shut down or at least suspend all activity before doing that.