How often do you format your hard drive? Many users express that they frequently format their hard drives. But they wonder whether such frequent formatting will harm drive or not. This article will expose the answer in detail.
Formatting a hard drive is exactly a process of deleting all the data, removing all the programs and setting up a brand new file system on the drive. It is believed that nowadays, most of users must be familiar with disk formatting. Although it seems complicated, actually, it is very easy as all operating systems provide users with native “Format” tools, such as “Quick Format” in Windows.
Reasons for Formatting
In reality, a lot of users tend to format their hard drives frequently. It is because that formatting can help users eliminate multiple issues. For instance, if your PC runs pretty slowly, disk formatting can speed it up. Also, when you upgrade your computer operating system, the internal hard drive will be auto formatted as well. In a nutshell, formatting does help users a lot. But, some users fear that frequent formatting will be harmful to hard drive. To be honest, it will not. Thereinafter, we will tell you why.
Equal to Data Read/Write
First of all, you should know a fact that formatting hard drive is simply a matter of re-arranging the bits, exactly the same as other read/write operations on the drive. Every time when you format a hard drive, it is actually like writing once to the drive. As we all know, writing will not damage the drive absolutely. The same holds true for formatting.
About Drive Lifespan
Yet, many users may have heard myriad points of view that formatting too many times will shorten the lifespan of the hard drive. Though a hard drive has limited write life before it wears out, the limitation is into the millions of times. So, the lifespan is pretty long indeed. When you format a hard drive, it’s generally one out of several millions, which can be ignored straightly. Therefore, even if you format a hard disk more than 30 times one day, it won’t make a manifest different in the drive’s lifespan.
Back up Anyway before Formatting
Despite frequent formatting not harming hard drive, so as not to suffer data loss, you should make an updated data backup for the entire drive. With it, after a disk formatting, you can easily restore data from the backup. Otherwise, if you end up formatting a drive without a backup, you have to perform data recovery, like PST recovery.
Author Introduction:
Shirley Zhang is a data recovery expert in DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including mdf recovery and outlook repair software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com
Leave a Reply