[SOLVED] Am I killing my Hard Disk ?

[mips]

There are limits to the amount of time that a hard disk can ultimately be reformated. My older 80G hard drive eventually became unusable because i reformatted windows sooooo many times (around 30+) because of studpid viruses. It was also my first time using linux and i must have reformated that about 10 times. Eventually my computer lost the ability to even write to the hard disk.

Absolute BS is all I can say!

If your drive died then it was because it was failing regardless of whatever you did.

[blastus]

If you are concerned about imminent hard drive failure, then get SpinRite.

[iSplicer]

In a way, it does, in a way, it doesnt;

Formatting writes data to the disc, and puts regular stress onto the hard drive (which eventually will kill it after you format 159191457 times)

However, formatting is just using your hard drive in a normal way, so it shouldnt cause any crazy damage whatsoever

[Daveski]

If it's got moving parts, it'll break eventually, just a general rule of life

Modern solid-state Flash memory only has a limited number of read/write cycles before it too will fail, so it's not just moving parts. Anyway, as mentioned by others, a format is NOT going to reduce the life of your drive more than any other type of use. Although it is worth remembering that it will workout the mechanics as the head will have to move over the whole drive so if the drive has gone bad, then a format might be the final job which makes it fail.

Anyone remember those drive testing diags which did things like butterfly seeks which cained the head moving mechanics and made the drive sound like it was about to explode?. Any good drive will take all this in its stride.

[xArv3nx]

I always used to think this, until I started formatting my disc 5-6 times every day (OCD, anyone?).

[mips]

When one does a normal quick format the contents of the drive does not actually get erased. For a lack of better terminology all that happens is that the indexes pointing to the data gets 'cleared' so only a bit of writing actually occurs.

I need to find a wiki or online article to explain this better than I can.

Edit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_formatting

Recovery of data from a formatted disk
As with regular deletion, data on a disk is not fully destroyed during a high-level format. Instead, the area on the disk containing the data is merely marked as available (in whatever file system structure the format uses), and retains the old data until it's overwritten. If the reformatting is done with a different file system than previously existed in the partition, some data may be overwritten that wouldn't be if the same file system had been used. However, under some file systems (e.g., NTFS; but not FAT), the file indexes (such as $MFTs under NTFS, "inodes" under ext2/3, etc.) may not be written to the same exact locations. And if the partition size is increased, even FAT file systems will overwrite more data at the beginning of that new partition.
From the perspective of preventing the recovery of sensitive data through recovery tools, the data must either be completely overwritten (every sector) with random data before the format, or the format program itself must perform this overwriting; as the DOS FORMAT command did with floppy diskettes, filling every data sector with the byte value F6h.

[mips]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_dr..._their_metrics
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/hard-disk.htm
http://www.cf-intl.com/evidence_recovery_basics.htm
http://www.cf-intl.com/evDeleted.htm

For those that want to do a bit of reading.

[Google Spider]

Thanks Everyone!

[regomodo]

Modern solid-state Flash memory only has a limited number of read/write cycles before it too will fail, so it's not just moving parts.

Please research this "fact" (myth) before you state it as negative point. Sorry, its my only pet hate as i did a masters dissertation on flash technology.

[Daveski]

Please research this "fact" (myth) before you state it as negative point. Sorry, its my only pet hate as i did a masters dissertation on flash technology.

Sure - I was not saying that flash was bad, just that there is a finite life span for this type of solid-state technology, not just mechanical devices.
I do realise that the endurance rating is so high on most modern flash devices that they will probably out-live traditional hard drives.