So I dropped a hard drive not too long ago around 1-2 feet, it fell on an edge meaning it didn't face first bash into the floor however I'm still a bit worried it's not functional anymore or the memory is lost on it. It's the size of a laptop's hard drive, it's been in kept in good conditions as well(well before this happened). The floor was a hardwood as well.
Laurence I
Favorite Answer
when a drive is OFF thats depowered
the heads are kept away from the disc surfaces by strong magnets.
most drives in this state will tolerate being dropped a few times.
when a drive is ON and SPINNING, any dropping, knocking, vibration
is resisted by its spinning, but the surface of a disc is highly at risk
and a touch will scribe a circular mark on the disc surface.
All those data blocks will be damaged permanently.
you might be able to register the faults and revive the drive(with bad blocks)
to a usable reliable state using a disk check with all the boxes ticked.
if the bad block count is too large the disk may be declared faulty an unusable
and will be prevented from starting.
Robert J
All you can do is try it & see if it still works.
If it works, back everything up to another drive.
A typical recent model laptop drive is rated to take up to about 1000G without damage when not running, or 350G when working.
It's *probably* perfectly OK, but if the data is important you should have more than one copy anyway.