Reformatting effects on your harddrive

[hotcrossbuns156]

Does reformatting have any permanent physical effects on your hard drive? I've reformatted my computer several times (10-20 times) and a sales associate at a major electronics retail store told me that it could slow down my hard drive write and read time.

 

[Zorg]

That's total BS. Did you ask why?

Also, why are you reformatting so much?

 

[Riggs-]

What Zorg said that is total BS. Reformatting only clears your harddrive of where data is stored. Not sure why you would need to format that much but there are not physical effects on the actual hard drive.

Riggs-

 

[jsc]

Oops. Never mind.

 

[Proximon]

A format, whether "long" or "quick", is just a write to the disk. Every time you read or write to the disk you are putting wear on the hard drive.

I would venture to say that certain areas of your hard drive see much heavier usage than those area dealing with the format. How many times a day do you think the page file is written and re-written?

A "quick" format does not even clear your drive of data. It just clears the "map" so that your computer believes the data isn't there any more.

 

[huron]

I'm amazed that you've reformatted that many times.

It is just as everyone has stated above - it's just writing the disk to look blank. It does cause ware, but no more than writing data.

 

[Shadow703793]

+1 for above posters,

As for reformatting so much, I too have probably formatted my test PC (used to test Linux distros,etc) about 10-20 times already.

6700th post!

 

[Zorg]

A "quick" format does not even clear your drive of data. It just clears the "map" so that your computer believes the data isn't there any more.

A full format does not clear the drive of data either, it just performs chkdsk to mark bad sectors.

If you want to clear the disk of data you need to, at a minimum, do a zero write with Active @ Kill Disk or one of the others.

 

[Proximon]

A full format does not clear the drive of data either, it just performs chkdsk to mark bad sectors.

If you want to clear the disk of data you need to, at a minimum, do a zero write with Active @ Kill Disk or one of the others.

Not arguing, just discussing, as it's been many years since I studied this...

I thought a full format erased the file headers as well? Not the same as a wipe, agreed.

 

[Proximon]

The more I think about it, I recall reading that the full format would not only remove the file headers, but remove the pointers from large files that are stored across sectors. Since files are not always stored contiguously, there has to be a pointer at the end of a sector, pointing to where the next portion of the file can be found... so large files get scrambled in a full format, unless they happened to be stored contiguously...

But that was many years ago when FAT 16 was the way it was done.

 

[Zorg]

Here are the details.

Differences between a Quick format and a regular format during a "clean" installation of Windows XP

 

[Proximon]

Thanks Zorg.

I did a little more research and discovered LLF:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_formatting

That's what I was remembering. I guess I missed the memo.

 

[cjl]

Low level formatting can damage the disk if you do it too much. It is unlikely that you are doing that though, and in most cases, you can't even do a low level format on a modern hard drive anymore - it is done at the factory, and that is it. Standard formats will not damage the drive in any way, regardless of how many times you do them.