@Hyperspeed
Well a drive's life isn't measured in years or how much it's head has wobbled about... it's in write cycles right?
Zac67 is right here, excessive seeking is
much worse than writing the same spot over and over again. HDDs have practically unlimited "write cycles" (it's electromagnetic after all, nothing physical involved), but read/write head (as mechanical component) has limited life-span.
I once created a bad block on a Win 3.11 system when I yanked the plug out just as it was reading a file. Possibly it was also writing to a swap file or something but it goes to show that the disk surface can be affected adversely by the head.
All new HHDs park the head gracefully if the power is lost. No bad blocks or head crashing will occur. This has been the standard feature for at least 15 years (just the implementation has changed).
Bad blocks are usually mapped out at the manufacturer but they do appear, who knows why.
If you see any bad block with modern HDD, then the HDD is dead already. All modern HDDs have upto 20% "extra" spare storage to replace bad blocks/tracks with. The remapping is fully automagic. Only after this all fails (running out of spare areas etc, or some catastrophic failure occurs) the drive will report the error to host.
All modern drives support
S.M.A.R.T for reporting the failures as they happen. With SMART devices and SMART capable monitor application (such as
HDD Health for Windoze, or
smartmontools, multiplatform) it is possible to monitor the device health status. This way you will sometimes be able to predict he HDD failure. Sometimes this doesn't help either, the HDD just dies instantly.
