Side Effects of Formatting Hard Drive

"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?"

"A better question is why do they re-format.

Do they do this to ""refresh"" a Windows install?
To make sure that all errors are found before they become a problem?

The first one is easy to fix, just install Linux or *BSD. This is of course assuming they can use their Windows programs in a VM or through Wine.

The second one is to run SpinRite on it regularly."

"Writing to a magnetic storage device will not cause ""wear"" on the ability to store data, in fact, writing data to magnetic storage drives ""refreshes"" the magnetism of the drive. This is why Steve Gibson wrote Spinright. It reads the data, and re-writes it many times in order to refresh the strength of the magnetic energy.

Doing this to a flash drive will wear it down, this is because there is a difference in the way magnetic storage holds data from flash technology. Flash technology uses floating gate transistors that wear out over time, like if you bend a piece of metal back and forth enough it will snap.

The only parts in a hard drive that are likely to wear out from use are the motor and chips. This is why I've written to hard drive manufacturers like Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital suggesting the mix of the two technologies.

I suggested they make a hard drive that has no moving parts but uses magnetic storage plates, with solid-state read-heads, one per sector, all addressed like flash memory.

These would be safer to store data on, last longer and if I had the skill or know-how to, I would patent it, but I don't so I just suggest it to others to get it out there."