Is it possible for a hard drive to die from dust?

[gary king]

My computer was placed on the carpet, and the hard drive was right in front of the front fan. It started having problems, so then I noticed the dust, and cleaned out the dust immediately. However, the drive continued having problems, and eventually died.

Is it really possible for a hard drive to die from dust? I thought the magnetic platter in particular was well protected and contained within a pressure-sealed environment or something? Or could some dust particles have entered it and crashed the drive head?

 

[popatim]

yes most definitly. It why you need a clean room to really open one up.
Though a harddrive usually cant let dust in.

 

[gary king]

yes most definitly. It why you need a clean room to really open one up.
Though a harddrive usually cant let dust in.

Yeah from what I've read, it's hard for anything to get inside a hard drive. It sounds like a one in a million chance, because of the air pressure, environment control, etc.

 

[ss202sl]

I don't think the issue is dust. It may be that the dust helped insulate the heat inside the drive causing high temps, but I don't think that dust itself was an issue. I've seen HDD's in systems located in places where dirt (tons of of dirt weekly) was being analyzed and the dust was everywhere due to constantly moving dirt around. The inside of the pc was always caked with dirt and dust to the point where I had to use a screw driver to loosen up the dust from the bottom of the case(on the inside). The HDD's never had issues, but we were constantly going through psu's.

 

[gary king]

I don't think the issue is dust. It may be that the dust helped insulate the heat inside the drive causing high temps, but I don't think that dust itself was an issue. I've seen HDD's in systems located in places where dirt (tons of of dirt weekly) was being analyzed and the dust was everywhere due to constantly moving dirt around. The inside of the pc was always caked with dirt and dust to the point where I had to use a screw driver to loosen up the dust from the bottom of the case(on the inside). The HDD's never had issues, but we were constantly going through psu's.

Okay thanks. That's weird then. Because I have a HD that was in front of a fan that was pulling in a lot of dust, but a filter caught 99% of the dust. The HD itself didn't appear to have much dust on it. In fact, the HD looked clean and flawless. And yet it still died on me.

 

[tagheuer25]

Carpets accumalate static electricity better than many things you can place your hard disk on. That's what probably killed your HDD, not the dust. Although I guess if the dust is thick enough, it can also be a source of static electricity.