[SOLVED] Will triple-booting kill my laptop?

[spencercarran]

I have a MacBook 3,1 Santa Rosa. I currently triple-boot OSX Leopard, Windows Vista Ultimate, and Ubuntu 8.10 Hardy Heron. I am likely to get rid of Vista for XP since Vista has terrible performance on my machine, or else get a RAM upgrade.

A friend of mine claims that multi-boot systems will destroy my laptop, and that he fried his old machine by triple-booting Windows, Hackintosh, and Arch. Is this something that I should actually be worried about? He warned me that reformatting the hard drive will wear it out and eventually break it, and also insisted that even maintaining my current triple-boot set-up will cause premature hardware failure. He recommended wiping Vista and Ubuntu and just sticking with pure OSX. I'm worried about this, since I don't really want to have to spend the money on a new computer anytime in the near future.

[hardyn]

uhh.... no.

any use of the drive will contribute to its ultimate failure. the disk does not care what is on it, all it knows is if a 1 or a 0 is stuck it each bit. could one of the OSs not play well with 2 other OSs yeah that is possible, but even then we are talking about data corruption, not physical damage to hard disk surface.

hard disks in notebooks fail (all disk fail, but more than desktop units, heat mainly). i would say that your friend has applied a false correlation. I have heard one IT pro describe hardisks in two ways: those that have failed, and those that have yet to fail... i would agree.

I think i would ignore your friend on this one, and just keep on 3 booting

[spencercarran]

That's what I was thinking, but he knows a lot more about computers than I do and was starting to get me paranoid. He also did some other stupid stuff, like overclocking his graphics card to the point where it melted onto his motherboard. Still, the point about reformatting the drive seemed plausible- would wiping and reformatting my drive repeatedly cause it to fail faster?

[hardyn]

well formatting isn't really like wiping in the sence of cleaning a window, what is done is a logical erase. all the data is still physically on the disk but the "file allocation table" for lack of better word is rewritten. the bits of the disk have not been set to 0s. the act of coping the files onto the disk is changing the disk.

it is true that the magnetic material that has only so many uses, however many that may be; but you gotta think that most hard disk manufacturers are willing to warranty a disk for 3-5 years... they gotta expect that some people are going to be kicking the _hit out of the drive inside that time, like in a server application.

constantly rewriting drive will cause the drive to fail faster, but what is faster? 30days? 60 days? over 3 years. the relationship with your hard disk is finite; make sure you are backed up and don't worry about it too much. a 300gb notebook hard disk is about 100$ today... they will be cheaper in a year.

relax, enjoy your computer.

if your friend is OC to the point of fire.... you should maybe take his advice with a grain of salt.

[tvtech]

any sustained writing to your drive over a period of time will cause it to fail faster, however, drives are cheep, really cheep. if it fails, buy a new one. I've been running a dual boot system on a hitachi 160gb drive for well as long as the hitachi 160's have been out. I think that was around 6.04 ? and it's still running strong. and it's been well abused left on for something like a year and a half straight with significant read write activity.

[cyberdork33]

uhh.... No.

+1

[spencercarran]

All right, thanks to everyone for the reassurances. Even if my hard drive does fail a little bit sooner as a result of my playing around with the set-up, if it's only the hard drive that's affected I can deal with replacing it somewhat earlier.