Can a Short Circuit Damage The Hard Drive?

There are situations where we stress out quickly when we start the computer and in a few seconds, it dies instantly due to some hardware failure. With that issue, we will discuss a question asked by many clients.

The Question

“Everything was working perfectly until my computer went completely off in a second I pressed the power button. The screen went completely dark and it wouldn’t react to anything, the only way to start it was to remove the power cord and plug it back in.

At first, I encountered that the problem was in power supply so I replaced the power supply. Still, the same issue was there so I reseated the RAM and GPU and hard drives and surprisingly my PC booted fine and I thought the problem was solved but then I found out that one of the hard drives is not working anymore.

The hard drive was not detected in BIOS. So I replaced the hard drive too and it worked for some time. But after a while, the same thing happened and again PC stopped. Again I did the whole thing and now my new hard drive is dead as well.

I checked everything and found out that there was a small screw stuck behind the motherboard shorting it. I removed it and now installed an SSD and it working completely fine!

Now, I have 2 1TB hard drives damaged with me. Is it possible that a short circuit due to screw caused it?

The Answer

It certainly is possible. If the screw shorted +5V line to the +12V line then it could burn up the Hard Disk controller on the board.

• Hard drives that are being used for a long time can crash by just a normal startup power switch too.
• A power surge from the wall socket can also cause a drive to fail. There is all kind of capacitors and diodes on board that can be burnt by a small surge due to cheap quality hardware.
• A logical hard drive failure can occur when the hard drive is writing the data and power go off. That can damage the sectors used while power went off. A screw shorting the motherboard seems like a valid reason for a drive to fail.

Hard drive failures are too common and inevitable. But in a condition of this data can still be recovered. In some cases, hard drive repair might be possible too. Data recovery requires special knowledge and tools, so always contact hard drive data recovery or computer data recovery professionals. To avoid such problems, always keep a backup of your data.