raycityclick

i know this is a noob question but, does formating decrease the life of the harddrive as much as intensive read/writing?

bigvaL

nope not at all

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MrSmiley

Well just like flash drives, you get X amount of r/w/x (755). Though on hard drives that is something around... ~120billion or something. So removing all files at once would be nothing more than removing one big ass file from your computer.

Edit: Also I like your name, my first name is Ray. Now "Shoot to kill" as AC/DC says.

batista

do u think when u delet a pic, song or w/e crap u may find in ur pc harm ur hdd? if u dont think so then formating doesnt either like the guy^ said.

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Burn

No, because it's such a small file it won't matter much. The only forseeable damage I can see is if, by formatting it so many times, you mess around with the tiny magnetic thingies on the platters.

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claymanhb

Formatting can be bad for the FILES on your drive but not the drive itself.

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NoAffinity

Just to clarify what "formatting" actually is, it is not a completely clean sweep of all of the data on the drive, but rather the re-writing of the File Allocation Table. When you format a drive, all entries pointing to the location of the data are removed, and the FAT is essentially a clean slate. With every new thing you install, save, etc, a new entry is written to the FAT, which essentially just points to where the data is stored. The same holds true for deleting items. They don't physically go away (the data is still there), but rather the entry pointing to it is removed from the FAT.

With this in mind, if anything, more frequent formatting will arguably extend the life of your drive. Everytime you re-format, the work load on the drive (due to a lack of "searchable" data) is all but eliminated.

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