I think the term you're looking for might be "adjacent track erasure", which is the idea that the magnetic fields of adjacent tracks on a hard drive interfere,

I think the term you're looking for might be "adjacent track erasure", which is the idea that the magnetic fields of adjacent tracks on a hard drive interfere, so if one track is written frequently (such as a file system metadata block), the tracks that are physicially adjacent on disk may eventually have some bits flip. It's hard to find concrete numbers on whether this happens, or how often, but it's something that people are getting more concerned with on the higher-density drives that are being made now. Of course, ZFS makes the issue pretty much moot.