I've never seen a HDD fail like that, but I'm willing to believe it's possible. I have seen read/write errors because of a buggy implementation of ALPM. But, a

I've never seen a HDD fail like that, but I'm willing to believe it's possible. I have seen read/write errors because of a buggy implementation of ALPM. But, agreed, whatever it was, if they were paying attention, they could have diagnosed and remediated well before they had any data loss.