Typically, hard drives can incur faults at some point during their asset lifecycle. Degradation might occur from heavy use, or issues relating to dust or overheating. We are seeing data centers invest in far more efficient, state-of-the-art cooling methods, which significantly improves hard drive health, but this does not make them faultless. The nature of things means that you will always see some drive failures, but the life span of drives is improving constantly.
In the instance that you encounter hard drive degradation, organisations need to have software-based processes in place to erase and return drives since many hard drives still respond to read and write, even if internal diagnostics and warnings advise complete replacement. If a drive is completely broken, then a fall-back physical destruction process is necessary as it can guarantee data sanitisation, material should then be recycled to reduce the environmental impact.