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What will happen if you format a hard disk many times? Will it damage the hard disk?

Ex. Installing a new OS every week.

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    'Will it damage the hard disk?" -- No. "Formatting" is merely writing the sectors with filesystem and OS data/metadata instead of user content. "Formatting" uses the same "write sector" command that is used to write your content.
    – sawdust
    Aug 7, 2019 at 1:19
  • As @sawdust says, the act of formatting the disk wont damage the hard drive. It would put more wear on the drive then doing nothing, but this is difficult to quantify and probably not significant. A hard drive is different to an SSD (ssds have a limited number of writes, so the question can be definitively answered as "slightly" for an SSD)
    – davidgo
    Aug 7, 2019 at 7:50
  • Possible duplicate of How Many times can we low level format a disk drive without damaging it?
    – Moab
    Aug 7, 2019 at 13:45

1 Answer 1

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There are two methods of formatting a drive.

  1. Quick Format (The Default)
  2. Unconditional Format

A quick format simply overwrites the MFT (Master File Table) and is done in a matter of seconds. In this case, nothing more than the equivalent of writing a file to the hard drive is occurring.

An unconditional format zeroes out every byte on the partition and generates a large amount of sequential writes to the disk.

In both cases, the activity of formatting the drive is less stressful than the every day reading and writing of files that causes the drive's heads to jump around over the platters seeking pieces of files.

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  • Sorry for downvote, but this is wrong. An unconditional format does not (usually) zero everything in the partition. The statement you made about stress is not neccessarily wrong, but its not neccessarily right either, what with caching, defragmenting and the different volumes of data written.
    – davidgo
    Aug 7, 2019 at 7:47

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