I refer to "bash faults" after 15 years plus in the electronics repair industry, and waving my engineering degree around, so it's all about knowing exactly what I can and can't hit, how hard to hit it, and in which direction. I sort of know how a hard drive works, you have nothing to fear so don't panic!
I appreciate things fail more often when they're older, but that's more often due to the mechanical parts, high voltage components, or faulty connections. I've rebuilt hundreds of machines written off as scrap with a bit of contact cleaner, a few new capacitors and a replacement hard drive or fan. Yes, processors go wrong - but in my experience, more often due to fan failure or the user letting the inside of the heatsink resemble a persian cat, and they rapidly head outside design temp. Contacts tarnish too, but actual hardware failure of a processor itself is quite rare. You are not talking about a mechanical device with wear and tear. But thanks for the heads up on how to Google something that's not really relevant.
And I do know the defrag tool exists, but that doesn't mean it's useful. The bottleneck is more and more the interface rather than the fetching of data, since bizarrely we've moved on from Winchester disks and their three week seek time and four bytes of cache.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
