Today I had two hard drives (one of them was my system drive) fail on me at the same time. With computers, it is common knowledge that if something is going to go wrong, then a bunch of things are going to go wrong all at the same time.

Of course, that’s not true. Computers constantly have problems, and usually the problems are easy to fix when they happen in isolation. All it usually takes is a few minutes of tinkering, or a fresh install of the OS, and all of my problems go away. However, the times that I tend to remember are the ones where multiple things go wrong all at once. These problems are usually more serious, result in a lot longer repair period, and usually mean a bunch of lost data (and a lot of inconvenience). It isn’t that these situations are more common, it’s just that they’re more memorable. This phenomenon applies to all events that we remember and not just computers (think, “When it rains, it pours”).

Now of course, there might be a certain amount of truth to correlations between computer components failing at the same time. Computers are large and complex systems, and for a component to function properly, it often depends on other components. Hardware malfunctions can cause software to appear corrupted, and one broken piece of equipment can sometimes damage other pieces of equipment. This is especially true when dealing with software where one corrupt program (especially if it is the OS) can cause a whole host of other problems; sometimes these failures are clustered. However, usually this is not the case.