Does Formatting Hurt the Hard Drive?

[ohnnyj]

Hello all:

Does anyone know if formatting a hard drive often will start to wear it down? I've had to reformat my computer several times recently to get it working just right and hope I'm not killing the hard drives in the process.

Thanks.

 

[Kalvin00]

Well, i'm on a computer right now that has a 5+ year old 13GB hard drive in it. It has been used, abused, formatted tens of times...still going strong, so if hard drives today are still built like they used to be....don't worry about it.

 

[sniperruff]

isn't formatting writing all 0's on a drive? well the drive is writing 1's and 0's as you are reading this anyway.

 

[ohnnyj]

So I suppose it is simply doing its job, then.

 

[DanDaMan315]

It puts the drive under as much stress as it will ever be under, but hard drives are built like rocks, you'll be fine.