How many times can you format an HD?

I'm just wondering, how many times can I format my Hard Drive before it fails or becomes unusable?

 

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In as many licks as it takes to get to the center of a tootsie-pop.

 

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The only limitation is until normal wear and tear breaks the drive and that is not something that you can predict.

 

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as long as your life span is and the need to format it anyways, rather than get a new better one in a store.

 

For the most part Hard-drives last a long time, however it's not as simple as "How many times a hard drive can be formatted" considering that most OS's utilise an area of hard-drive space as a "swap drive". Originally the limitations of RAM were dealt with using this method so that large files could be opened etc.

Although most peoples computers probably have enough RAM to operate without the need of a hard-drive being used this way, the OS's are still built to the most part to use them.

Since for instance Windows is a GUI OS, there is constant writes and reads to and from the hard-drive.

I would suggest that your hard-drive will last as long as the operating systems do not step over the boundaries of their hardware limitations. (i.e. heads/cylinders, I/O baud)

 

My guess is Stryder some sort of computer program within sciforums...masking itself under a human, it knows any computer questions that is being asked.

 

Or he could just be a super-geek.

 

thats out of probability. :grumble:

 

i have an 18GB hard drive that is 8 years old and still usable.
it's been reformatted more than 100 times.
it's been repartitioned maybe 10 times.

 

the only estimate you really get from the manufactures is the MTBF - Mean Time Before Failure - for the model of HD in question.

However, most drives fail before that estimate (I read an article two weeks ago about the real world average being shorter than the advertised average); I instead look at the manufacturer's warrenty and double it- industry standard is currently three years, so I work with a rough estimate of 6 years per drive.

I've had some go in 4, but most last longer than 6 when not in a server that on and working 24/7. given how fast hard drive size increases, I rarely have the same HD for more than 6 years, and because I back up my important data, I've never lost everything. I still have my middle-school english reports saved in my system backup directory that I cary over from OS install to OS install.