Can hard reboots damage your HDD ?

[PowerK]

For some reason, I always wondered about this... but afraid to ask.

If the system suddenly freezes and I reboot form the reset/power button on the PC case, can it damage the HDD/SSD ??

Also, when the system is turned back on after hard reset, you know how Windows says... "Windows did not shut down properly last time"... and give you options like boot normally, boot into safe mode etc.. Does this mean the sign of software(Windows OS) failure (file system corruption) ?

 

[Cerb]

For some reason, I always wondered about this... but afraid to ask.

If the system suddenly freezes and I reboot form the reset/power button on the PC case, can it damage the HDD/SSD ??

The answers are very different, based on which one. Reset? No way it should. Power, maybe. It shouldn't, mind you, but I wouldn't say it won't, especially with an SSD. HDDs have been protecting against this sort of thing for years, now. I'm not sure if any SSDs are guaranteed to stop and do nothing, after no response for some time.

OTOH, if this happens often enough to worry about it, you should be working on fixing it, instead.

Also, when the system is turned back on after hard reset, you know how Windows says... "Windows did not shut down properly last time"... and give you options like boot normally, boot into safe mode etc.. Does this mean the sign of software(Windows OS) failure (file system corruption) ?

Possibly. Windows doesn't really know. It just knows it was not properly shut down. File system corruption can be detected by chkdsk, which will run if it can't easily flush the journal. File corruption is impossible to detect that way, however, and most desktop programs don't safeguard their data formats against such problems.

 

[Revolution 11]

My strictly anecdotal evidence (limited to hard drives on Windows XP and earlier) is that the actual drive is rarely damaged by abrupt power failures. Drives have been designed for years to prevent damage from these events, although sometimes they fail. So your actual drive should be safe.

Data corruption is more likely. I personally have witnessed many power failures on many different computers but not a single event directly caused a OS terminal failure, as far back as Windows 98. Corruption of data is variable because watching a stored movie will cause less corruption than active moving of files from the computer to another partition/drive. The former is being read from RAM so even if a power failure flushes the RAM, the hard copy should be intact on the drive.

Unless you are working on active projects or moving/processing data around, power failures are more harmful to your system components. I have never worried about the power failure that happens randomly once a year. It is the repeated instances that are indicative of a larger problem.

 

[Charles Kozierok]

If the system suddenly freezes and I reboot form the reset/power button on the PC case, can it damage the HDD/SSD ??

Not generally.

Also, when the system is turned back on after hard reset, you know how Windows says... "Windows did not shut down properly last time"... and give you options like boot normally, boot into safe mode etc.. Does this mean the sign of software(Windows OS) failure (file system corruption) ?

There is the potential for corruption if you don't shut down properly, and that's what the message is about. But that's a data structure issue and doesn't mean hardware damage.

 

[PowerK]

Cheers for the insight, folks! Greatly appeciated.