[Swordmaker]

BTW - Signing into your Live Account does not crash your hard drive. Not using it for a very long time and then starting it up was the more risky action in this case. Of course you had no choice....Apple computers used to eat hard drives all the time. I don’t know if they have fixed it up, but there was something about OSX that caused drives to fail every couple of years. I have replaced many Apple hard drives on my own machines and others and only replaced maybe one or two on Windows.

I don't know what you've been doing to your Mac's hard drives but I've been managing Mac networks with upwards of 20 and 30 Macs for a couple of decades. During that time I have seen one (1) hard drive failure on a Mac. I simply do not believe your claim. Apple Macs have to be beaten to death with a Mack truck. The drives Apple uses are selected from the 95% percentile quality of the manufacturers' output. . . only those are selected by the manufacturers; to get an Apple logo and be sold to Apple.

We just retired a bunch of iMacs purchased in 2008 due to upgrades. One of those was the one that had the hard drive fail abut five years in service. Except for one, the rest are still working fine and they are being sold for $400 each at eight years old. The exception has a dim back light and we are selling it for parts for $150, even though it still works as a computer.

[Dalberg-Acton]

If you watch the drive activity light on a Windows PC, it flashes all the time. Install Wireshark to see the network activity and you’ll see how “chatty” Windows can be. I have no idea what those servers are that it talks to constantly.
I put wireshark on Linux Mint and I don’t see all that.
Anyhow, this constant activity probably means constant wear on the hard drive of a Windows PC, especially if indexing is enabled.