It’s taken a fall or two to the soft carpet floor from a height of about 16 inches, but I don’t think this should be a problem.
I’m sorry, but those 16 inches are more than enough to damage a drive beyond repair. And more than once, it’s a miracle it lasted this long. Remember, a drive has a platter(s) spinning at more than 5,000 rpms. If that head hits the platter, it can take chunks out of it destroying your data permanently. An internal hard drive that’s been dropped a mere half an inch can be seriously damaged.
Once a drive is running, you shouldn’t even move it because of the wear stress that it produces on the spindle motor. Spinning drives in both laptops and pcs that are moved around a lot can expect to have much higher and quicker failure rates.
