Why Hitting a Hard Drive Won't Fix It

If you do a Google search for data recovery, you'll come up with a list of some reputable companies that provide the service, followed by a list of some less-than-reputable companies, followed by a great deal of do-it-yourself folks that claim to have fixed their damaged hard drives by putting their drives in freezers, dropping them, switching out their parts, and even hitting them. Yes, hitting them.

The crazy thing is that hitting a hard drive to get it working again has some merit, but it's not something to even consider attempting in serious data recovery situations.

The idea is that by hitting the side of a drive with medium force, usually using the handle of a screwdriver or some other blunt object, a person can dislodge the heads if they've become "stuck" on the platters, or otherwise misaligned. It does work occasionally for very light errors. If you've got a failed hard drive and you're not too worried about the data on it, you can go ahead and try this method.

However, if you care about the data on the drive, hitting a hard drive isn't a great idea.

The simple reason is that hard drives are more precise than that. The heads of a hard drive are programmed to float a micro-inch above the platters, and have the ability to jump from sector to sector with astounding speed, always making the exact right jump to get where they need to go. Hitting the side of the hard drive to dislodge the heads, therefore, can potentially cause a great deal of damage by offsetting the heads to a location on the platters of the drive that they're not supposed to be. The head crash might end up being worth, potentially causing platter damage (which irreparably damages your data by physically scratching the magnetic information off of the disks) or just make professional data recovery a lot harder and more expensive.

Again, I'll point out that there is some merit to this idea--very light physical problems can be fixed by a light physical shock. Just don't think of it as a miracle cure--a hard drive isn't like Fred Flinstone. If it gets hit once and stops working, hitting it again's not necessarily going to fix it, and could make your problems worse.