Class action claims Windows 10 causes hard drive failures and other problems

Not really Microsofts fault but difficult to check for and explain that some disks that are already broken start to die or refuse to work after an Upgrade that rewrites big parts of the disks. Bad sectors are getting remapped when beeing written to and likely writing 10-15gb on these disks caused the disk to reach it's reserved sectors and just giving up - or the new writes couldn't be read anymore after booting.

However for someone that has no knowledge about computers and just uses them this issues might make them angry at Windows 10.

I have seen machines that looked OK but then you try to upgrade the OS and all hell breaks lose and when you look closely you see that disk errors messed up the install, sometimes trashing the whole system. (Although on one Windows machine it would always roll back the install and leave the machine usable)

I have seen this on both macosx and windows.

I haven't seen any compelling evidence that W10's upgrade process is so broken as to break hardware or fundamentally not work correctly as described here. It sounds like coincidence.

But the fact that I read "Windows 10 destroys hard drives," nodded to myself, and thought "huh, maybe," is indicative of how incredibly poor Microsoft's QA has become lately, and how low my trust is in them as an entity. Businesswise, they've adopted some great strategies. Software quality wise, not so much.

On a related note, what would be HN readers' preferred HDD SMART monitoring tool for Windows? Back on Linux the GNOME Disks utility did the job adequately but am now on Windows.