[Joe Forster/STA]

Originally Posted by DABhand

It happens with HD's when power cuts happen especially if the disc is being written too, it can scratch the surface badly or the pin ends up in an awkward angle that when you start up the HD it snaps or loosens the pin.

That may have been true in the past but not anymore. Hard disks have been automatically parking the heads whenever they go off, whether it's because of a power cut or a normal shut down, for more than a decade. Also, they rotate all the time and the head "touches" the disks (read: hovers on an air pillow over the disks or, for laptop hard disks, touches some kind of grease on the disks) all the time so there's no difference between reading/writing or running idle.

However, even if you're getting mad about how bad your PC is behaving, try to NOT keep bashing its case because sudden movements (read: great acceleration) can kill the hard disks, especially when they're on (read: the head is over the data area, not over the parking zone). Keep bashing the keyboard instead as they're cheap to replace; I know from experience.