not personally, i may have seen a video or two of it happening, but it's hard to tell whether the head is dragging against the platter, or it's the bearing, either one of those makes horrendous noise.

If you're worried about it happening on a drive you own, you should copy that data somewhere else as a backup, ideally sooner rather than later. If you're curious about the health of the drive you do stuff like SMART tests as well.

Yeah, most drives are solid state now, unless you're buying hdds for archival purposes, still cheaper and denser in most cases. It's a low probability failure, until the drive meets EOL, in which case it's a mechanical wear part, either the motor or the bearing fails. One of them will fail first, probably the bearing.

The bearing failing would likely result in the HDD overheating as a result. Assuming the platter still spins, but that's the only scenario i can think of where that would happen, unless you dump a very specific amount of continuous current into the read arm coils. That might also cause it, but it's not likely at all.

An ssd "overheating" is more likely, but it shouldn't cause too many issues, maybe premature degradation over long term use, and slowing of read/write speeds, or in some cases, an improvement, but other than that it should be business as normal. You would have to hit it with like a heat gun, to get a hardware failure or something like that.

[–] Professorozone@lemmy.world 3 points 8 hours ago

I'm not actually worried about my drives. In fact that was kind of the point. I was kidding around because this excuse that the hard drive overheated sounds a little like a car running out of blinker fluid.