So, you bought that new high capacity hard drive? You have probably thought, "Cool, I have loads of storage now," and it is really fast! You never gave it a thought or really care as to how the drive works. You never really think that the drive spins extremely fast and it is very fragile environment inside that box. Well, even though the hard drive is a very complicated device and books could be written on how they work, we will just leave that up to the experts. However did you ever wonder what would happen if the atoms that are spinning around inside that hard drive that you know as data would continue to spin out of control?
Scientist have recently found that rapidly-spinning drives could fall vulnerable to a "magnetic valanche." To keep it simple, this means that the electrons (atoms) are spinning so fast that they cause the electrons beside them to "flip bits" or change from a 1 to a 0 or 0 to a 1, hence causing data corruption.
Hard drive manufacturers have been working on new designs and using state of the art materials to prevent this kind of thing from happening. During the manufacturer process
they do a procedure called "damping," which is the process of quieting down the drive or reducing vibration. This keeps the spinning parts continuously at the precise rate of spinning and the magnetism stabilized inside the drive.
In real life, the chances of a drive suffer from this condition is slim since the manufacturers have these safety mechanisms in place. However, If a true avalanche would happen, it could be assumed that data recovery would be next to impossible perform.
There is nothing that can be done to prevent a magnetic avalanche and there is no way to know if this has happened to your hard drive. The only sure fine way to keep your data safe is to back up on a regular basis to another source (media.)
