deteriation or danger of reformating windows on your hard drive?

I would like to know if i am damaging my hard drive bye reformating windows on my hard drive??In the last year i have done it 2 times and am about 2 do it again in a period of 1 year and 4 months equalling reformating windows 3 times.Any advise .Thank you Daniel.confused




I have moved your thread Daniel, to the "Hardware" section were you should get a better response. The "Lounge" is for Non Technical questions

 

Unlikely you'll damage it - you'd have to be reformatting it at least every month or so to be doing damage.

 

A format simply rewrites the FAT (File Allocation Tables, there's two, a "main", and a backup copy) removing the files index and tells the system that the space is available for writing new files. The files are still on the disk until over-written.

A "wipe" actually writes data (usually zeros) to the disk in all available sectors/blocks.

In any case, you write data to the disk every time you use the computer. (C: anyway.) It's basically the same thing.

 

Thank you for the information that is reasuring.James.

 

Reformatting does no harm, in fact it is good for the drive. It is also the quickest and most effiecient way to delete and clean up (defragment) large files such as video files which can be several gigabytes in size.
I keep a drive specifically for video editing. It is formatted at the start of every project and has never given trouble; the editing goes more smoothly too.