Good grief...I'm a role model...
Joe...best way to learn about computer hardware is 'hands-on'.
It all started with my first P100...back when a 1 gig drive was about the biggest thing available...and my Western Digital Caviar 1gig decided to self-destruct, 'bad blocks' all over the place....and only a few weeks old..so I took the comp back, demanding a new drive..which I got...after a bit of a wait...[a week or so]...and this one...another WD 1gig popped bad blocks even faster.
Now once upon a time, it was common for drives to suffer the odd block damage/failure...some might even have 1% of their 'surface' damaged over time. In my case, I 'figured' something might be wrong when I got to 250 meg and counting....everytime there was a write to the drive I got more baddies popping up.
Finally a 'moderately' critical block went gaga...the 'boot sector', and the drive was as dead as the proverbial.
This time I told 'them' to courier a drive over to me and I'd put it in myself, as I needed to get up and running again quickly...and they did...a 1.2 gig...[they'd run out of the others...doh].
This was the first time I'd been inside the comp myself...and while changeing the drive I heard a faint crackle from the PC speaker...
Strange, I thought....the comp wasn't 'on'.
I twiddled the wires and lo, more crackle.
Closer inspection and I found the soldered wire contact shorting to the comp chassis.
'Hmmm', I thought. This was probably 'not good', considering that static discharge was supposedly sufficient to frag a comp, and here was 5 volts live to the entire box itself.
No wonder I was crashing heads, etc, destroying harddrives.
Out with the soldering iron and all was fixed.
The 1.2 gig never dropped one block in all its subsequent life.
Since then, I've preferred to make my own mistakes...I'm sure I can do them better...