I don't know why my hard drives died either. And while a physical motor breaking is more tangible, a contact wearing out is also imagineable. I don't really care why ssds or hdds die, I care that they do and therefore I have backups (well, ideally I would). I've had spinning rust fail on me while I was sitting at it and it didn't help me save it, it might as well have been dead in zero seconds.
I don't really care why hard drives die either, but I like that, more often than not, I get some warning. SMART logs, or weird kernel complaints, in my experience, are frequent precursors.
I'm a little scared about my new SSDs that have replaced a few rust-spinners in our data center.
That's the big difference for me. Drive's making tictictick sounds? Kernel log full of bigScaryErrorsLikeThis? It's time to ditch that disk before the disk ditches you. Make it happen. Panic-Backup if you need to. etc.
Every SSD failure I've had, the failure mode was "what SSD?"
Now, I realise most people should ponder their backup regime before the tictictick, not after. But as the phrase goes "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best is now." The SSD equivalent is "The be- nope, too late."
They're just terribly unforgiving, which doesn't fit with a culture that values cure over prevention.
