What are the disadvantages of formatting hard disk drives and solid state drives several times?

Hello Guys!
What are the disadvantages of formatting HDD and SSD several times? As for me, any accurate and exact information can't be found at Google. Some websites mention formatting is same with "Shift + Delete" and can be reformatted as many times as one's wish without making any damage. Others mention formatting can reduce the life time. Which is correct? I'm really confused about it. My Questions refer to both HDD and SSD. Hope you guys help me. Thanks all!

 

HDD: nothing

SSD: nothing unless you reformat every week for example. SSDs have a finite amount of writes, but i highly doubt you will perform a format more than once a year so, yeah, no effect.

 

Technically, formatting, like any other operation does put some stress on any HDD or SSD. But the effect is negligible to the overall health of the drive.

 

Thanks a lot for the replies. Do u all mean that formatting HDD or SSD several times can't harm to itself??? I bought SP V30 120GB SSD for my Alienware M17xR3 at the previous week. I ordered my laptop with RAID0 500GB SSH. I was gonna use SSD for boot partition and the old one for backup partition. Yesterday, I tried to restore factory state from my complete backup DVDs. I applied SSD at port 0 and the next one at port 1. At first, I thought that everything would be restored to SSD. But it didn't. All the data are restored to HDD instead of SSD. I don't know why. So, I deleted partition and restored again and deleted and restored... oh... 5 or 6 times within few hours. As for SSD, I installed fresh copy of Windows 7 but driver problems occurred and I formatted and then, it took me to reformat it for about 3 times within an hour. Now, everything is OK... but... how do you think about my procedures? I've formatted them for about 5 or 6 times within a day!!! Any damage to my SSD and HDD??? Now, I can't stop blaming to myself and also blame to my quick decisions.

 

don't think it would matter much even if it was formatted 20x, so don't worry about it.

also a fresh install of windows is like 7-9gb, so even assuming 20gb that's only like 120gb written.

 

If it's a quick format, it really doesn't matter at all, because all it does is clear the file table. Full format will clear all the data, but like others said, once in a while it really is negligible.

 

HDDs don't have limited writes. You can format all day and all night and it won't make a difference - HDD usage isn't (much) of a factor in lifetime, moreso its variances in heat.

SSDs have limited writes.

 

AFA SSD is that where over provisioning comes in ? I read the enterprise Intel 200 GIG has 120 Gig Over provision, thus it will last much longer than a typical intel comsumer drive. TIA, Josea

 

Don't sweat it.

Even if you touched ALL cells of NAND Flash within your SSD, you would need to do this about 10,000+ times (for MLC based Flash) before they would stop allowing writes to the drive. Assuming you touched all cells, 5 or 6 in one day is not going to shorten the life of your drive by too much.

Also, FWIW the number of reads is unlimited.

 

Wow! I really appreciate all the replies. I think I can now relax my mind. Hummm... 10,000+ times are available for writes before SSD is gonna be a read-only one... so... how many years will it last? I'll use it for gaming and programming. U guys use SSD? Is it still support writes to itself.

 

Bottom line, don't worry. 10,000+ times is a minimum. Even if you wrote the full contents of a 120GB SSD every day, assuming equal wear leveling (done automatically), that's 10,000 days / 365 days per year = 27 years. Most users write at most 5GB per day, probably more like 2GB per day average, so you're looking at a long life. Chances are the controller will fail before the SSD.

 

10,000 was the number for 50nm IMFT NAND, which hasn't been in production for 2-3 years. It's 5,000 for 34nm (used pretty much only in the Intel 510 nowadays) and 3,000-5,000 for 25nm NAND (used in most modern SSDs - OCZ made this process size quite famous with their Vertex 2 switcheroo).

I'm not sure what the numbers are like for Toggle NAND, but I don't think it's much better since 32nm Toggle NAND (Vertex 3 IOPS) is only expected to last as long as 34nm IMFT NAND.

 

My SSD is SP V30 120GB. Can it last at least 10 years? Maybe I'll buy new one after 5 years or maybe 10 years if it's still support writes.

Very very glad to hear that!

 

In any case there are users with 32GB SSD's bought years ago that have tens of TB written with no failures. There is a site that is actually testing the SSD's with writes to failure and so far they exceed manufacturer specs by a long shot. I'll see if I can find it (didn't bookmark it, damn).

In any case even at 3000, that's 8 years of writing full SSD every DAY (again assuming equal wear leveling)! That's not normal practice for anyone unless they are using an 8GB SSD.

Bottom line is, for a normal user, don't worry about it. If you do constant writes, then better to get an SLC enterprise-class SSD anyhow.

 

Yes, I had forgotten that fact. Thanks for the reminder/correction.

 

Most of the ancient SSDs from back when Samsung was the only game in town are SLC, so naturally they would last forever.

Probably more than 8 years, given how wear leveling and write amplification have improved with each generation of controllers. Of course, there's also the fact that all SSDs have spare area.

Now this I can agree with

 

If you take a look SSDs can take up to at least 478TB of constant non-stop writes before becoming read only.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm

 

Umm, question: was I misinformed when I first got my SSD, or is it not true that defragmenting an SSD is about as much use as blowing on a lava flow to cool it down? I thought with SSD's not being mechanical, fragmentation was a non-issue...

 

No these were MLC. Don't have link atm, but several users here at NBR have them.

Assuming write amplification of 1, anything less is just hogwash. It's a crap marketing ploy with Sandforce for compressible data. Most data isn't that compressible, and most consumer SSD's only have 7% spare area if any, even sandforce has moved to 13% from 28%. Wear leveling also isn't 1:1 either, although it's close. And with Sandforce you couldn't write all day at a reasonable speed anyhow because of their "technology" that slows down write speeds if too much is written in any length of time.

 

Yes. That is correct. During use the SSD controller will move entire 4KB pages around in an attempt to apply writes equally among all cells (wear leveling). And, as you mentioned, since an SSD can address each cell in virtually the same amount of time, fragmentation is a non-issue.

Besides, if someone *would* run a defragger, they are placing unnecessary writes on their drive, which over time will reduce the number of times the NAND cells can be written to.

 

Ah, I just reread the thread title again and it makes more sense now. I thought the original question was about defragging SSD's, not formatting them. Oops.

 

I appreciate all the posts, the great ones. Now, I get the best knowledges of SSD and I'm sure I'll not make the unnecessary writes including formatting to my SSD anymore.

Thanks for the link, yknyong1. It's perfect for me.

Now, I'm using Diskeeper 2011 with HyperFast module. This technology is only for SSD. The company said their HyperFast can extend the SSD lifetime and imporve performance. There's no problem yet! But... Can I use it without worries? I'm sorry if this topic seem to divert the current main topic.