The reason I ask is I read this on another forum:
"Disks are surprisingly tough if not actually doing read/write at time of impact, there may well be no damage"
I'm not sure how to interpret it though because I don't know when a disk is "reading". Like, does it just read at certain intervals even if you aren't doing anything with it? Even after reading your guys' posts I'm still confused about that.
Also, I use StableBit Scanner so I am scanning every sector on the drive atm. I'm assuming that's a good enough check, and if everything looks fine on there I'm all good. Correct?
Just what do you mean by you "bumped" it? Did your knee hit the computer when you turned your chair or did you swing a sledge hammer at it? Did it get flung across the room? Was the drive just sitting on top of the PC bare with cables coming from the inside, or is this a USB-connected drive in an enclosure?
If the drive is actively spinning, that's all that matters and you should pretty much consider it to be reading/writing SOMETHING somewhere on the drive all the time, but you have no way to know exactly what it was. In terms of damage due to impact, there's no difference between reading and writing - the only thing that changes there is electrical flow. If the heads didn't actually impact the platter and just got jostled to the wrong track without causing physical damage, then there could be file corruption or data loss because it didn't finish writing a file or even wrote momentarily on the wrong track. A chkdsk or similar tool could locate such corruption but there's no guarantee, but the OS and file system should be aware that the write did not properly complete.
The OS will be randomly reading or writing little bits outside your control all the time, and you never know when the heads are moving between tracks (the sound of a drive won't be noticeable for a very small movement). Even if you were opening a large file, meaning it's definitely spending a long time reading, you don't know where the sectors storing the file are physically located on the disk, and it could be spread out so the heads would be passing over all kinds of other files. A hard drive works like a record player, so just imagine dragging the arm on that across a record as it's spinning - every song is going to get damaged. And of course if the heads crashed, they may get destroyed like the needle on a record player and you're not going to be doing any repairs just by scanning with software, if it will even work at all, and probably can't even copy good data from the platters.
In the quote you provided, they are basically referring to the fact that the heads move outside the actual data areas when the drive is idle, so even if they crash, they just hit empty areas, or even just air if they moved off the platters entirely. But you simply have no way to know where the actuator was positioned when you bumped it because of all the stuff that a modern OS does in the background, not to mention all the background applications you might have running and what they might do, and even if you think it's reading or writing a specific file the heads are actually moving over areas storing many other files. But if you just happened to have a folder open but weren't actually manipulating files on the drive, or watching a video stored there, etc., then there's a high chance the heads were parked even if the platters were spinning.
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