does formatting damage hdd?

I

ichundu

New Member
hi,

i've heard many people say that continuously formatting does play negative role to the hard disk or other parts. actually i don't think they are right, but recently i had to format my computer often, and wanted to make clear if there are any issues with this thing.

thanks for any help
 
Only when you delete a partition and make a new one do you slowly begin to loose drive space.
 
ichundu said:
hi,

i've heard many people say that continuously formatting does play negative role to the hard disk or other parts. actually i don't think they are right, but recently i had to format my computer often, and wanted to make clear if there are any issues with this thing.

thanks for any help
Click to expand...

I would not think so, unless your talking about doing a format and installing the OS 5 or 6 times a day and working the drive to death. But opening and closing programs/Defraging just about anything works the drive. There is a average lifespan of a drive in hours and I would say its increased or decreased buy how hard a life the drive has had, but in general no.

voyagerfan99 said:
Only when you delete a partition and make a new one do you slowly begin to loose drive space.
Click to expand...

I dont know any other way to say it but no.
 
Formatting a hard drive will NOT ruin it, and I don't think partitioning it too many times will, either, because if you think about it, you are formatting the drive to reinstall/install an OS or make room for swap, I hope you are not formatting to delete info, because it is NOT gone. If, however, your drive thrashes around a lot even when the computer is untouched, it's going to deduct some life off of the drive. And so will waiting ten years before running defrag for the first time is not going to be appreciated by your hard drive - it'll take hours - I've heard a day and several hours into the next day in one case - to defrag a system that hasn't been defragmented for months or years (Remember, the read/write heads must move to do its work, and when defrag is in action, those arms fly back and forth helplessly - so doing that for several hours is not good) Other killers are heat, bumping/kicking/shaking, contamination (a small particle of dust can be like a big boulder under the read/write head) and power issues (surges and brownouts) - NEVER EVER EVER remove any sticker on a hard drive- even the nameplate sticker - behind those "stickers" reveal small holes and you can see the HDA if you look. Most of those "stickers" are expensive air filters that let a very tiny amount of air in for ventilation and so that way the heads can be pushed up when the disk spins.
 
^ Yeah...like 4 partitions is a lot. Dude, do 50000 partition deletions and creations. You'll see.


Yep, they're called breather holes, in some cases. People who says that an HDD is air-tight and that if you open it up, it's dead...well, they're wrong. It's got air...but highly filtered air.

As far for partitioning, it can screw up an HDD, since you play with the allocated size each time. But, by the time it stops working du to partitioning, your drive will be dead by a mechanical fault. Also, it's best to clean the drive by doing a low-level format. The "zero-fill" drive. It's basically writing the drives with zeros. I'd recommend a 4-pass "zero-fill", so data is all lost. Goverment destroys the drives, or sometimes does those crazy 20+ pass.
 
thanks for the responses.

so, some of you guys think repartitioning is not good. i've been doing it too, so i'm willing to stop it. the zero-fill formatting seems interesting, i may want to test it someday, but no need to hurry since i'm not running away from any government :D
 
I had to do a zero-fill format on my WD hard drive, because it kept crashing all the time, after doing it, its perfectly fine, and actually faster than it used to be.
 
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