Does clean installing frequently hurt hard drives?

Sorry about this stupid question but I can't help it. So yeah, I've had 3 laptops exchange and refunded and since everytime i get a new one I clean install my hard drive. I'm finally getting a brand new asus u36sd dh51 since i messed up the bios update. My mind is tellling me to just buy a new hard drive instead of just sticking in a 3 months old hard drive that has been clean installed a lot lately since I kept changing my mind on which laptop should I stick to. I'm finally sticking to my asus u36sd and my hard drive will have been clean installed 5 times now. Does it hurt the HDD by clean installing it alot or would i be better off buying a new hard drive again?

Thanks!

 

Well, a lot of frequent writing onto the HDD, moving the files, formatting can contribute to a faster degradation... but I don't think that having reformatting the hdd 5x by now will have any significant bearing on it's lifespan.

I think that the possibility of buying a new/faster/larger capacity HDD is more likely way before this one 'goes'... and I can tell you that HDD's can last a long time with plenty of being done on them in the meantime.


I'd go with your current hdd... unless it has been acting strange (if it hadn't, I see no reason not to use it).

 

Thank you

 

Reading and writing a lot doesn't really affect a mechanical hard drive. SSD's are more worrisome in that regard.

 

+1 The media on magnetic hard drives really isn't subject to wear and tear like SSDs are. While the read/write activity MIGHT contribute to wear and tear on the read/write head assembly and actuator, I doubt it matters in the long term. I'd think what matters more is simply age.

 

To agree with the rest here, I would stick with the 'proven' 3 month old drive too.

The only reason to get a new one is for more capacity, more performance (like the XT Hybrid 750GB Seagate) or your new system can fit more than one HDD at once. But with the new one, you'll know around the middle of April if it is as reliable as the drive you have now.

 

If you fill up the drive COMPLETELY and reformat EVERY DAY, it should last at least over 8 years.

That's longer than a normal HDD would last, and after the NAND is worn out the data should be (this is built into the JEDEC specs) recoverable for at least a year.

 

I've re-imaged my computers countless times (the wife's especially, she seems to attract those fake antiviruses...) with no issues. I can't say I've ever killed a HDD without exposing it to sudden physical trauma.

 

Its also worth mentioning that Windows does alot of reading/writing without you knowing about it. ALOT. At one stage I was tracking writes with software and found that it was *constantly* writing to ntuser.dat, ntuser.dat.log1, c:\$logfile, c:\$mft, c:\$bitmap, c:\$directory and other low level/ data/registry scratch files that you never see or use because its all hidden from the user.

Even with my computer idling for most of the day, I would frequently see well over 10gb of writes to these files per day. When you think about it, reformating your PC once in a while or installing a big program don't even rate because you only do them once or very infrequently. Windows is constantly reading and writing all the time, even when you aren't doing anything. Even with Windows battering your system drive round the clock, modern hard drives and solid state drives are designed to handle it and then some. You don't need to worry about it.

Edit: When you start reading about Windows internals you quickly start to appreciate how mind bogglingly complex it has become and how little you actually know. Most of the complexity is abstracted and hidden from the user so they never have to think about it or deal with it. But it has a downside in the sense that users like you and me don't really understand how our software and hardware works, or how it interacts. We start to make very strange decisions based on very basic and often incorrect knowledge of how our computer works.

 

The oldest HDD I still have in use will become 14 years old soon. It has seen countless installations of all sorts of operating systems and a lot of read and write accesses.

 

No reason why under normal usage an SSD wont last that long.