Hard Drive - If the power is cut, can that be bad for it?

I see that this technology is in modern HDDs, to prevent damage to the data:

Landing zones and load/unload technology

Hard disk drive failure - Wikipedia

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What happens with HDD if power is lost? | TechPowerUp Forums

"All drive manufacturers have an auto park feature that safely parks the heads over the landing area when drive is spinning down".

It seems like they can land on the surface, but the manufacturers have taken steps to avoid it, that HP thing just one of them.

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Failure Type: Power is lost
Effect: Head is parked in the landing zone using spindle energy.

Many years ago, hard drives heads used to stop wherever they were when the drive lost power. If you then moved the computer, the motion could cause the head to bump the drive. At best you scratch the platter and lose some data. At worst you snap the head right off. There used to be programs for DOS that would manually park your HDD before you turned the computer off in case you were going to put the computer in a vehicle or something.

Heads now snap back when they lose power and this can't happen anymore.

The residual spinning of the platter after power loss is enough to maintain the air bearing long enough for the heads to park (there aren't any brakes so they spin and gradually slow down).

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Here is something interesting I found I wont to share... Didn't know that there is lubricant in HDD :)

HDD operation is heavily influenced by temperature. Bearings, both in the spindle motor (either BB or FDB) and in the rotary actuator (BB) rely on lubricants. The lubricant's viscosity, like any lubricant, changes with temperature. Thicker when cold, thinner when hot. Colder temperatures are more problematic, since the increased viscosity significantly "stiffens" the bearing, resultant drag is high and motors may not be able to achieve their minimum operating speeds. But high temperatures can cause the lubricants to fail, with obvious consequences.

In addition, mechanical dimensions of the entire HDD assembly will change as a function of temperature (the HDD components are primarily comprised of Aluminum and Stainless, which have different coefficients of thermal expansion. This usually isn't so much of a problem, since the mechanical tolerances allow for this, but it can result in reduced performance. And significant temperature excursions can cause glue bonds (bearing cartriges are usually glued together) to fail and/or result in brunelled bearing races.

The recording heads are also affected by temperature. The critical parameter is something called "Fly Height", the distance above the surface of the disk at which the "Slider" rides on it's "Air Bearing". Too high (usually colder) can cause write and read errors. Too low (usually, hotter) can result in contact between the Slider and platter, permanently damaging the HDD.

The disk surface itself is coated in a fine layer of lubricant. It's designed to provide some protection if the recording head (Slider) contacts the disk surface. Temperature effects this lubricant like any other. In particular, at very high temperatures the lube can "spin off" the disk, reducing the effectiveness of the protecting layer.

The magnetics and electronics all behave differently as a function of temperature. Usually, the HDD is designed to compensate for the effects. But operating the HDD outside it's temperature limits can exceed the range of compensation, typically leading to read and write errors.

As a general rule, higher temperatures are worse in terms of HDD longevity but the HDD should generally work OK up until the point when something breaks. At cold temperatures the HDD may not work at all, but it is unlikely that attempting to get it going will do it any harm, it just won't work.

Mechanical shock and vibration are the enemies of HDD reliability.

The recording head consists of a "Slider", which flies over the surface of the spinning disk (think of an Air Hockey puck and you'll get the idea). The Slider contains the read and write elements that allow data recording (think of a Cassette Tape recorder and you'll get the idea). The Slider is attached through a "Suspension" to the rotary actuator. The HDD positions the Slider at different radii across the Disk by rotating (think of a Phonograph Tone Arm and you'll get the idea). The "Air Bearing" created by the flying Slider is fairly robust, but shocks in the Z direction can force the Slider to contact the disk surface, and that's bad.

Desktop and Server drives use Contact Start Stop, the heads actually land on the disk surface when the disk is stopped. Mobile drives use something called "Ramp Load", the heads are lifted off the disk when the disk is stopped. For this reason, it is not a good idea to use a Desktop HDD in a mobile application. Desktop HDDs are prone to a kind of damage called "Head Slap" when stopped, and so are less robust when it comes to tolerating the types of mechanical shocks likely to be seen in a mobile application.

Data is located on the disk surface in a series of concentric tracks. Each track is divided in to segments called "Sectors" (think of Pizza slices and you'll get the idea). To locate data on the disk, the HDD rotates the Actuator to the target track, and then it waits for the desired Sector to rotate under the Slider and past the read/write elements.

The HDD has to control the Actuator very accurately, track widths are measured in microinches. Linear motion (in the X, Y, or Z direction) has very little effect on the HDD's ability to "Track Follow", the Actuator is balanced, but rotary motion (rotation around the Spindle Motor's Z axis) is very difficult for the HDD to handle. The HDD will monitor it's track position and abort read and write operations (and subsequently retry) if it's straying too far, so usually the worst effect of linear or rotary shock is reduced performance. However, very large shocks can result in mis-reads or mis-writes (the Slider strays on to an adjacent track while reading or writing).

Vibration can excite resonances in the HDD's mechanical structure. Resonance has the effect of magnifying the vibration and it can result in the same kinds of errors and lost performance that large shocks will cause.

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