Is this a myth or not

[mukmaster]

I have heard that if you flip the switch on the back of your pc or disconnect the power to the hard drive without doing a proper shutdown. there is a 20 percent chance you will phisicaly damage the disk drive.

[alexio]

You don't wanna know how often I've done this. Disk is still fine, I only needed to do checkdisk a few times.

[mukmaster]

OK so it doesnt make it so it has bad sectors or make it sould like a delta case fan.

[zinff]

I'm sure it wasn't intended to function like that but i also couldn't begin to count how many times i've done it to my 80GB WD test drive. no adverse effects yet.

[TMM]

it *could* damage it because in a soft shutdown the harddrive parks the head before the computer turns off - if you cut the power the head won't park

though IMO i'd say it wouldn't do alot of harm to HDDs that are around now, they are pretty robust compared to hdds of a couple of years ago.

[Ugly n Grey]

there is always a chance a live power cable will arc slightly when being pulled....it's always a bad idea..

[kiwi]

Well, it is not advisable to do that on purpose :)