Is formatting bad for a storage device?

[nemouk]

I format hard-drives and smart media quite often.

Is this particularly bad or good for a device?

Thanks for your time.

 

[AMB]

I havn't seen any side effects from where I have done it, I guess if any damge was to ever happen, you would need to do it 1000 times or something like that?

 

[Prodigy^]

it tears on them a little of course, but it's not something that would make it live for significantly less time at all

 

[toadstool]

Well, i think it has a lot to do with the wuality of the hard drive also.
My old Compaq 200 mghz came with a Quantum hard drive. I killed the darn thing after a few too many formats. I think i formatted it , maybe a total of 10 times in its lifetime.

Anyways...When installing Windows again , during the initial "disk surface check", I started to get errors. It only got worse from then


I don't know if this was a typical experience or not but I am REAL cautious about doing formats since then.

 

[Xtremist]

Heh, wow. I didn't know it could be bad for them. Man, I format SOOOO much. Like 2-4 times a year at least! My friend has more than that even. We do it when we just want to do a brand new "clean" install once stuff get's a little bogged down. I was actually going to format this one and put Win2k on it, and then format the upstairs one and load WinME on it. Still will, but now I'm gonna be hating every minute of it

 

[Zach]

Formatting is no different then normal usage, just a bunch at once. Saying a fdrive dying from formatting just means it had problems, and died from usage. I don't think there's anything wrong with formatting a drive, I consider it healthy.

 

[Modus]

Zach is absolutely right. A drive is just a collection of bytes -- billions and billions of them. Formatting read and writes to some of those bytes. It doesn't do anything special that doesn't happen during an ordinary read/write operation.

When you type FORMAT C:, all you are doing is telling DOS that you would like to erase the FAT (File Allocation Table) on the C: drive. DOS finds the correct partition and drive, and wipes the FAT, creating a new table. Then, as you watch the 1%. . . 2%. . . 3%. . . counter, FORMAT is testing the data area of the drive by reading or writing to every single cluster (sector). Again, the FAT, the partition tables, the data area -- these are all just artifical structures on the hard drive, created by the operating system and not treated any differently by the drive hardware itself. In fact, the hard drive doesn't even "know" it's being formatted. As far as it's concerned, some one is just reading and writing to the disk as usuall.

So-called "low level formatting" (not the kind done at the factory which is a different process altogether) is not much different. When you low level format a hard drive using a special utility, it simply ignores partion tables, FAT's, data, boot sectors and every other artifical structure created by an operating system and writes zeros to the entire drive.

Modus

 

[Modus]

DP

 

[nemouk]

Thank you all for your responses, particularly Modus for the techincal merit behind the facts

Thanks again.

 

[Mday]

well, formatting actually means writing something at the beginning of the disc, so do you think writing is bad for a storage device?

well if it is, then everyone is screwed because we read and WRITE to storage devices all the time.