Manuel Bouyer writes:

> > > It's quite possible that windows won't push it that hard.
> > 
> > That's possible.  Ah, you mean and that's why the problem may not have
> > been noticed more widely?
> 
> Yes. Really, I don't believe a driver can damage a hard disk.

Well of course it might not be drive damage.  The operation that is
failing is a read operation, it may be that the drive has written
garbage onto the platter - and that could be driver related.

Indeed, the other day my server hung, and on a hard reset one of the
disks refused to fully revive until a power-cycle (it probed, but
wouldn't otherwise talk it seemed).  Which was surprising and new, and
makes me wonder whether some change has started issuing "funny"
commands to drives, causing them to malfunction in unusual ways (like
failing to complete sector writes, leaving them unreadable).

But I realise I'm just adding noise here - I don't know what happened
with my server or drive...  I'm rather hopeful it was a really nasty
power spike and it will never happen again :)

Cheers,

Dave