Side Effects of Formatting Hard Drive

I know people who reformat their hard drives once a month. This seems like a terrible idea to me. I've done some preliminary research and it seems like you can wear down the drive by reformatting and it seems like it's generally not the best practice.

However, is it okay to reformat your hard drive as much as you want? Is there a limit before damage occurs?

Solution 1:

No. It causes no wear of any significance whatsoever.

In classic (non-SSD) hard drives the magnetic material on a drive's platters might eventually "wear out" and lose it's ability to store magnetic charges after a ridiculously huge number of writes, but hard drives will fail long before that due to mechanical failure.

Classic hard drives suffer the most wear during spin-up and when doing excessive head movements. Formatting is no different than writing to the hard drive normally. In addition to that, normal usage writes to the same general area of a drive very often and requires lots of head movements whereas formatting will sequentially overwrite the entire hard drive, writing each location only once.

In Solid State Drives, the main cause for breakdown is actually wear on the NAND cells storing the data which will eventually be rendered incapable of keeping their charges. During normal usage, most SSDs employ wear-leveling algorithms that will make sure data is written to different cells across the whole drive, even if it requires shuffling existing data around.

Formatting an SSD causes only an insignificant amount of wear. On an Intel X-25M, as stated in this article, if you formatted such an SSD once a day with full erase (no quick format), it would still last more than 5 years.

Solution 2:

Of course there's some wear involved. The question is whether it's enough to matter.

I'd argue that it is. Your hard drive, in addition to your fans and optical drives, are one of the few places in a computer that relies on moving parts (unless it's an SSD, and that has it's own reason not to format the drive regularly). As such, it's also one of the more likely parts of a computer fail. Hard drives in particular can be a pain when they fail, because they often take a lot of data with them.

Solution 3:

If you are not doing a full format of the drive where you just delete and create the partition or the write a new file allocation table (or whatever it's called these days) not such a big deal, you are only writing to a small part of the drive.

Personally drives are so cheap, who care about some small amount of wear from formatting monthly?