Hard drive failure modes are more likely to be recoverable. The most common failure for a DVD (other than scratches) is physical degradation of the storage med

Hard drive failure modes are more likely to be recoverable. The most common failure for a DVD (other than scratches) is physical degradation of the storage medium, which makes the data corrupted and completely unretrievable, if it can be read at all. A spinning disk is most likely to fail because the moving parts get locked up. In a pinch, data retrieval specialists can move the platters to a new drive and be able to read them again. Magnetic hard dives do sometimes experience spontaneous data corruption, but it’s much less common, and typically corrupts only a file or two (a flipped bit here and there) rather than making the entire drive unmountable. The exception is if you expose your drives to stormy magnets, which... we’ll, you don’t do that, do you? I’m less familiar with SSD failure modes - perhaps someone else can speak to that.