Bad for Hard Drive to format too many times?

Hi,

I wanted to know if it's bad for hard drive if I reformat too many times.

 

Not at all. Go nuts.

 

It can. I've gone through many a hard drive because of my reformatting practices. But I think it's hit and miss. It's really hard to say for sure.
For example, I had a hard drive just outright die on me one day, and bought a replacement (exact same model, specs, everything), and that one seemed to weather the "storm" and was able to survive my formatting until I gave it to my brother.
Even though a component operates within the manufacturer's specs, the quality can still vary.
From what I can tell, people seem pretty evenly split down the middle on the subject. I personally have hard drives fail cause of it. So take that for what it's worth.
I format on a regular basis out of habit, I don't like to keep an install for a long period of time (case in point, my mom, has never reformatted her computer from 98 and has tons of problems, her computer just BEGS for a fresh install).
I think, if anything, reformatting constantly probably brings out "the worst" in a hard drive, i.e. if it's low quality to begin with, it's more likely to fail sooner cause of it.

 

Unless you're bit-formatting (erasing all to 0 or 1), all you're doing is marking the entire HDD as re-writable space. Obviously if you constantly re-write everything, like the OS and all the programs, it's going to tax the HDD more so than if you didn't.

 

I've never done low-level formats on any of my hard drives. That can be VERY hard on a hard disk (no pun intended ) if done many times. I've just used standard formats, and that has killed quite a many hard drives for me.

 

There's nothing magic to formatting. You're just writing to the harddrive. Harddrives are made to be written to. In fact, it's better than most harddrive access because when formatting, you only write to each sector once. When editing files, typically the same sectors get written and rewritten over and over.
And how often do you format? Let's go nuts and say once a week. That means each sector gets written to (assuming you do a full format every time) just over 50 times per year. Assuming you want it to last 20 years, you've written to each sector 1000 times more than you would otherwise.

Now, last I heard, people were worried about SSD drives because they can only handle 10,000-100,000 rewrites per sector, which is far less than a harddrive can deal with.

At this extreme rate of formatting, that'd be enough for a SSD to survive for 200 to 2000 years! Now, let's be skeptical and assume that a harddrive is *only* 10 times more durable. That gives you 2000 - 20,000 years of weekly formats!

Please tell me how this can possible be more harmful than booting your computer.

And how do you know that it's formatting that kills your harddrives?
You don't. I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from that. You might as well claim that it's Windows that does it (because you install that every time), or Linux, if you use that. MS Word, perhaps?

 

I don't assume it's the formatting. Again, the jury seems to be out on that topic.
Quality between components does vary, and I only said, excessive formatting could enable a hard drive to fail sooner than usual.

 

We're not talking about SSD's here, I believe that belongs in the OTHER thread. Even so, that math is flawed. It's just not so cut and dried like that. Components rarely, if ever, perform to exact specifications, and even so, it's all only on paper.
My last hard drive on this current pc died after only 6 months. Hoping my new one lasts much longer (fingers crossed).
I will say, any excessive use on any component causes wear and shortens the lifespan. Any thing. Cars, computers, everything.

 

I only format once a year.

 

I just reformatted my HDD 15 times in the past month...

Freakin' registry/boot/system errors... bah!

 

Yeah I don't see how it would be bad for the hdd to format it every so often. You're writing to it all the time anyways. That's what it's there for.

 

I agree! I mean if you reformat fine, the OS is like installing a video game as far as the HDD is concerned. If you install much more you might want to think about partitions. Some of the responses here show a shortcoming in understanding. Kind of pushing the limits of common sense.

 

So which is it?

This had NOTHING to do with the number of formats you've performed on the drive. Hard drives fail. It's common knowledge. I've had many drives fail that have only been formated once.

You do not have the time or energy to format the drive enough times to cause it to fail. If it fails during a format that does not mean the formatting process is to blame.

Well it's a 10 year old OS, which is probably on a 10yr old PC! Issues are generally Drivers, Users, and Hardware - DUH. Proper maintenance can prevent OS issues. How many programs has she installed and uninstalled?

She's had here computer for 10yrs. Her hard drive has survived Millions of reads/writes, but you can fry one with a dozen (dozen or so) formats? Not likely.

You may format daily. You may have had a few bad drives. They are not connected.


Formatting your hard drive WILL NOT harm it!

Don't worry about it. It's OK to format your drive.

 

Basically, the positives of reformatting outweigh the negatives... which I don't think there are any besides losing a few hours of your time, depending on how much stuff you have.

 

I know. My point was that people are worried about SSD's because, unlike harddrives, they have a limited number of writes per sector before they fail.
Implication: Harddrives can handle more writes than SSD's.
Therefore, if I can show that a SSD can handle a lot of formats, we'll know that a harddrive can handle even more.

Which I did.

Of course harddrives can fail before or after this average number. But that has nothing to do with whether or not you format.
My point, since it seems you missed it, is that even if you format once a week, it amounts to very few writes per sector, so few that it's unlikely to cause any damage within the first 50 years. (Of course there are plenty of other factors that will probably kill a harddrive before then. But formatting, seen in isolation, isn't an issue)

Yep. And would you call it excessive use for your kids to sit at the steering wheel and pretend to drive?
Because that's about the level of use we're talking about. One format is *one* write per sector. A harddrive can typically handle hundreds of thousands of writes per sector, if not more.
It's about the least intensive thing you can do to a harddrive, short of turning it off.

 

So, in short,the idea is that formatting doesn't affect the hdd more than writing any type data on it.

 

I refomatted my hard drive I believe over 10 times in one month because of some problems....if that statement is true, then my hard drive is at the dying end...

 

There's is no difference between a format program writing data, and notepad writing data, except in the fact that the format program is writing a whole hell of a lot more data.