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I think a disk crash was more likely the read/write head crashing into the disk rather that two disks crashing into each other. I've seen platters with part of the oxide covering scraped off by a head crash, exposing the aluminum underneath.
– Keith Thompson
Commented Oct 24, 2011 at 1:04
@KeithThompson Ahh... I am sure you are correct... I wasn't sure as I wrote that, and now you said that, it suddenly reminded me!
– William Hilsum
Commented Oct 24, 2011 at 1:08
2

There's nothing like cracking open a drive and seeing a huge furrow dug by the head in the platter...
– Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
Commented Oct 24, 2011 at 1:09
Hard drives now automatically (usually) park heads when power to them is cut. (Voice Coil Servo Head Actuators) In "olden" days, they didn't do this automatically and you would use the park.exe command. (Stepper Motor Head Actuator systems which thankfully have gone with the dinosaurs, another characteristic was having a cold start in a cold room where the platters had shrunk so much that the heads were no longer positioned over the tracks and the system wouldn't boot till the drive had spun for a half hour to warm up.)
– Fiasco Labs
Commented Jan 16, 2012 at 23:13
@FiascoLabs and WilliamHilsum: Do you know if hard drives from around 16 years ago auto-parked their heads on power loss?
– pacoverflow
Commented Sep 16, 2016 at 15:07

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