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does REFORMATTING ruin a hard disk?

T

Tony Williams

Weaksauce
Joined
Aug 11, 2005
Messages
111
Okay,

I need some STRAIGHT answers ....

DOES reformatting RUIN a hard drive?

I don't think it does, but I'd like to show someone, they don't belive me.

Anyway please come on ....
 
No, its just like reading or writing data to the drive. Except it writes all zeros.
 
It definetly will not hurt your hd.

As stated above it just overwrites all your data with 1s and 0s.
 
It used to be that it was possible for repeated formatting to wear out the magnetic recordings on the platters that mark the drive's geometry and provide the feedback for the servo motors and head positioning. However, since the advent of Giant Magneto Resistive heads and advances in hard drive manufacturing methods, it takes an absolutely gi-f'ing-normous (BTW, that is pronounced "ji-EFF-ing-nore-mus" and is a technical term ;)) magnet (a magnet bigger than the drive itself) to screw up that data, making repeated formatting no more stressful on the disk than any other sustained write activity.
 
yeah, what doug said too. =/ what the fuck doug, you take hard drive knowledge steroids or something. ;) its nice to have a good mod in here.
 
DougLite said:
It used to be that it was possible for repeated formatting to wear out the magnetic recordings on the platters that mark the drive's geometry and provide the feedback for the servo motors and head positioning. However, since the advent of Giant Magneto Resistive heads and advances in hard drive manufacturing methods, it takes an absolutely gi-f'ing-normous (BTW, that is pronounced "ji-EFF-ing-nore-mus") magnet (a magnet bigger than the drive itself) to screw up that data, making repeated formatting no more stressful on the disk than any other sustained write activity.
Click to expand...
ALways wondered the same thing.

Please stay on the topic of Disk Storage and please do not talk about me, thanks. There are many other knowledgable and helpful people that frequent DSS. - DL
 
The servo positioning and geometry markings being set from the factory also explains why it is neither possible nor desirable to "low level format" modern ATA drives. The magnets they use during the manufacture of the platters are so strong that the markings last for years (decades probably) and cannot possibly be overwritten by anything inside the drive.

Once again, this not the case on older ATA drives. It was possible on such drives to rewrite this information, and for the data to be worn off over time, making the drive useless, as the read/write heads would be able to figure out where they are on the disk, making the drive inaccessible. Obviously, the overkill they use now makes the geomtery information pretty much bullet proof, eliminating another potential cause of drive failure and data loss. Even frequent DoD level destructive erasing isn't going to kill the geometry information on current drives.
 
Also, formatting does NOT overwrite the drive with 1's & 0's. A zero-fill (many times called a low-level format nowadays) does that. Formatting only creates a new file table which makes the drive think it's empty, when the old data is still there and recoverable.
 
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