Force laptop shutdown damages hard drive or SSD

Both SSDs and mechanical hard drives have current loss protection systems, but even with that you can generate failures, errors, data corruption or even disaster if these systems fail, because they are not infallible.

If you have mechanical hard drive

As a general rule, a loss of current such as occurs when we forcefully turn off the laptop, it should not damage the hard drive because they all have a cache for these cases. However, it may happen that if at that time the disk was performing an intensive writing task, the data is half-written and, therefore, remain corrupt and inaccessible.

If this data had to do with system files, the entire operating system could be corrupted, and the laptop would stop booting, forcing us to format the system.

It can also happen that the mobile arm of these discs remains in an unnatural position, or between means of several sectors, in which case when starting again it may not return correctly to its initial position and, in this case, four things can happen:

• That the sector of the disc in which it was being written is damaged and is inaccessible.
• That the head does not return correctly to its starting position and the entire disk is inaccessible. Sometimes, simply restarting again is fixed.
• The MBR (Master Boot Record) is damaged and the disk will no longer boot. In this case it is usually solved by formatting.
• Absolutely nothing happens thanks to the protection systems, which is the most normal.

If you have an SSD

SSDs, lacking mechanical parts, have more effective security systems and are more difficult to damage. Thanks to the PLP (Power Loss Protection) protection, the SSDs are able to maintain the integrity of the data, and this can be done by both hardware and software (firmware to be exact).