does formating a hard disk too many times affects its quality?

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mgupta

Broken In
hi guys,i want to know that if format my hdd or flash drive too many times,would it affect the quality of the disk?if yes,how?
 

koolbluez

Šupər♂ - 超人
The more u format(full format).. the lesser life ur drive might have... as formatting changes alignment of disk on molecular level... as data is saved by aligning these particles in some way or other.

Chances... I'm not sayin it'll gone for good... just increases risk chances.

U quick-format drives if u wanna remove data as in case of fresh OS installation... doesn't remove data completely.. but is lighter on the drive :D
 
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amandeep86

Fortuna Favet Fortibus
I have formatted my Desktop more than 100 times & now, its HDD is showing me signs of Death. (HDD is SAMSUNG 80GB 7200 RPM)
 

chesss

mera kutch nahi ho sakta
^quick.
Formatting doesn't cause any harm. Atleast quick formatting is cent percent wear and tear free, coz only the file allocation table is modified.
 

almighty

Ambassador of Buzz
ooppppppssssssssss
i alwayz formated with full :(
and its abt 100+ times...
now i keep it in mind to format in quick mode
thanks for ur suggestions :)
 

..:: Free Radical ::..

The Transcendental
koolbluez said:
The more u format(full format).. the lesser life ur drive might have... as formatting changes alignment of disk on molecular level... as data is saved by aligning these particles in some way or other.

Chances... I'm not sayin it'll gone for good... just increases risk chances.

U quick-format drives if u wanna remove data as in case of fresh OS installation... doesn't remove data completely.. but is lighter on the drive :D

LOL. Its just magnetic alignment. It does not alter the hard disk per se. Moreso, i daresay, it is not the molecular level (but duh, they may be using solme large polymer film so maybe)
Bad sectors appear over the years by the oxidation of the magnetic film, heat or my mechanical wear and tear. It is definitely not caused by the no. of times you realign the pieces. Low level formatting however has been implicated in decreasing the life of the hard disk not the full format in windows or dos based utilities we use.

The only disadvantage of conventional reformatting is a old hard disk with a few bad clusters. Reformatting and reallocating data risks corruption as good clusters may be marked bad and bad ones may get marked good due to data read/write errors.

I can relate as i have experienced it firsthand. Though I have my os still on the 40 gig samsung 5400 rpm with several bad sectors,on 24x7 operation fort the last 7 years. It has only 2mb in bad sectors which i managed to isolate into unpartitioned space which I never use.
It is said that a disk which starts devceloping bad sectors is showing the herald of its impending failure. Not so with mine. They have remained static since the last 4 years.
I must assert here that in my noobie first few years I have experimented with all flavors of windows, several of linux and even solaris. I used to reformat almost every week (for a stretch even every day).
 

vish786

"The Gentleman"
..:: Free Radical ::.. said:
It has only 2mb in bad sectors which i managed to isolate into unpartitioned space which I never use.
how can one isolate bad sector ??, like if i have a 40 gb hard disk, which r partitions like

C: 20 GB (OS is here/ primary disk)
D: 20 GB

now in between like in C drive, if a 2 MB bad sector is developed after 1st GB(final sector of 1st GB), the bad sector is at beginning of the 2nd GB, and i know now that at this place i have a 2 MB bad sector, but if i format the C: drive to install the OS again, then the 2 MB bad sector is placed still on hdd but not isolated like u said u isolate and is unpartitioned. but how will the OS know this while installing that it has to unpartition the bad sector ?? like 1st GB is partitioned and the next 2 MB is unpartitioned and the next remaining size is partitioned. ?? then how can i install an OS which of greater size. ?? oh man, hope this is not too complex for u to read. :rolleyes:
 
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almighty

Ambassador of Buzz
hey man me too wanna know how u isolated bad sectors :O
plz tell me mate ... and how to seach for bad sector, i know my hdd has bad sector coz i am not anle to defrag one partition...
is used O&O defragment to fix it but no luck :(
how i can know exactly where bad sectors are and how to isolate them?u mean u can skip bad sector during making partition??? really but how????
plz guide me mate :)
 

koolbluez

Šupər♂ - 超人
I full-format only when i get bad clusters... on my old drives.. whenever i noticed bad sectors cropping up... i used to full-scandisk & then full-format... noticed that the bad sectors detected by full-scandisk are put aside by full-format... lost the bad sectors.. but then no bad sectors in my working space.. meaning safer data :D

Regd that formatting thing I said.... well... I heard this somewhere else... long time back... know that it might b a myth, but i take my precautions... magnetic alignment and all... wont there b a structure alignment there too... @least in the electronic level :D
I'm not a pro in this field of electronics.. mayb those guyz will look into the matter & shed better light.
 

..:: Free Radical ::..

The Transcendental
Use some hard disk utilities to partition according to the cluster no. Omit the rotten cluster in your partition table.
i don't remember the exact tool, but i guess it was Ranish Partition manager.
Google for something called Hiren's :D. Don't blame me if you do something stupid to your data. Always keep a backup and dont trust system restore if you are using windows.

I too used to remove bad sectors using some tools but they crop up again after some time and may even spread. these are those areas of the hard disk which do not magnetize correctly. This may alter the alignment of nearby areas, hence it is best to isolate them.Once, as luck would have it, a bad sector appeared on an area which supposedly marked the beginning of my data partition, which by more bad luck was NTFS and compressed. As a result the entire MFT got corrupted and it lost all the data. That was an entire 2 year worth collection. Though I to recovered 80% of the data, it was a shocker. So something had to be done. From now on I keep my data on a slave hard disk and boot from my old 40 gb hard disk.
Whats even more interesting is the fact that my old hard disk is a samsung 40 gb 5400 rpm, which is known to be the most notorious to develop bad sectors. Though I wont't take that away from Samsung, my fist bad cluster of 2kb developed in the first 3 months.
 

vish786

"The Gentleman"
..:: Free Radical ::.. said:
Use some hard disk utilities to partition according to the cluster no. Omit the rotten cluster in your partition table.
i don't remember the exact tool, but i guess it was Ranish Partition manager.
Google for something called Hiren's :D. Don't blame me if you do something stupid to your data. Always keep a backup and dont trust system restore if you are using windows.

I too used to remove bad sectors using some tools but they crop up again after some time and may even spread. these are those areas of the hard disk which do not magnetize correctly. This may alter the alignment of nearby areas, hence it is best to isolate them.Once, as luck would have it, a bad sector appeared on an area which supposedly marked the beginning of my data partition, which by more bad luck was NTFS and compressed. As a result the entire MFT got corrupted and it lost all the data. That was an entire 2 year worth collection. Though I to recovered 80% of the data, it was a shocker. So something had to be done. From now on I keep my data on a slave hard disk and boot from my old 40 gb hard disk.
Whats even more interesting is the fact that my old hard disk is a samsung 40 gb 5400 rpm, which is known to be the most notorious to develop bad sectors. Though I wont't take that away from Samsung, my fist bad cluster of 2kb developed in the first 3 months.

u still dint answer my query about isolating a partition dude :confused:, anyways i too know about this ranish partition manager, didnt find any such option of isolating partition in it.
plz do care to reply about this since u know much abt the operating of hard disk.
what is conventional format ?? is it quick format / full format ??
which is better ?
 

..:: Free Radical ::..

The Transcendental
^ you don't isolate a partition. you isolate a few clusters. Say your cluster no. 123456 is damaged. I wud suggest to make your partitions between say clusters 0 to 123454 and
123458 and beyond. leave the clusters around the bad one unpartitioned. quick format just erases the file indices, it doesn't delete them i.e. it tells the os the files are gone so that you can overwrite them. A full format rebuilds the entire allocation table and marks all the clusters as free. thus a bad sector may be rarely labelled free.
you risk losing data if it is written over this mismarked bad sector.
Some utilities claim to remove bad sectors by resetting the alignment of the clusters.
I would advise against them. Maybe your bad cluster was a false positive, but you may be pushing you luck.
a low level format is done by hard disk manufacturers or in very old hard disks (those 2gb, 4gb dwarves of generations past) and you and I don't need to worry about them.

For more format options, in a dos command window, key in
format /?
eg.
format D: /Q /C /X /FS:NTFS /A:512
quickformats D; to NTFS with 512 byte clusters with compression enabled after forcibly dismounting it.
Smaller the cluster size, IMHO more the fragmentation, lesser the performance, more the compression but lesser the proportion of bad clusters you'll get.
The best way to avoid bas sectors is to keep your hard disk cool, in a static free environment and always shut down/ restart properly.
Defragmentation does not always mean better hard disk life, Frequent defragmentation unnecessarily thrashes the hard disk and makes it heat up and can prove detrimental. Instead organize your files in a proper way and keep them at one place.
Defrag once a month or fortnight to maintain performance

vish786 said:
now in between like in C drive, if a 2 MB bad sector is developed after 1st GB(final sector of 1st GB), the bad sector is at beginning of the 2nd GB, and i know now that at this place i have a 2 MB bad sector, but if i format the C: drive to install the OS again, then the 2 MB bad sector is placed still on hdd but not isolated like u said u isolate and is unpartitioned. but how will the OS know this while installing that it has to unpartition the bad sector ?? like 1st GB is partitioned and the next 2 MB is unpartitioned and the next remaining size is partitioned.

You'll need to reparttition. the first partition should be less than 1 gig before the bad cluster.
The others should be after the bad cluster.
You may need to install your os into the larger partition, which won't be a problem if you are using WinXP or later as they needn't be installed in the c drive.
I hope you get the picture:
*img405.imageshack.us/img405/2416/picnd9.jpg
 
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vish786

"The Gentleman"
..:: Free Radical ::.. said:
^ you don't isolate a partition. you isolate a few clusters. Say your cluster no. 123456 is damaged. I wud suggest to make your partitions between say clusters 0 to 123454 and
123458 and beyond. leave the clusters around the bad one unpartitioned. quick format just erases the file indices, it doesn't delete them i.e. it tells the os the files are gone so that you can overwrite them. A full format rebuilds the entire allocation table and marks all the clusters as free. thus a bad sector may be rarely labelled free.
you risk losing data if it is written over this mismarked bad sector.
Some utilities claim to remove bad sectors by resetting the alignment of the clusters.
I would advise against them. Maybe your bad cluster was a false positive, but you may be pushing you luck.
a low level format is done by hard disk manufacturers or in very old hard disks (those 2gb, 4gb dwarves of generations past) and you and I don't need to worry about them.

For more format options, in a dos command window, key in
format /?
eg.
format D: /Q /C /X /FS:NTFS /A:512
quickformats D; to NTFS with 512 byte clusters with compression enabled after forcibly dismounting it.
Smaller the cluster size, IMHO more the fragmentation, lesser the performance, more the compression but lesser the proportion of bad clusters you'll get.
The best way to avoid bas sectors is to keep your hard disk cool, in a static free environment and always shut down/ restart properly.
Defragmentation does not always mean better hard disk life, Frequent defragmentation unnecessarily thrashes the hard disk and makes it heat up and can prove detrimental. Instead organize your files in a proper way and keep them at one place.
Defrag once a month or fortnight to maintain performance



You'll need to reparttition. the first partition should be less than 1 gig before the bad cluster.
The others should be after the bad cluster.
You may need to install your os into the larger partition, which won't be a problem if you are using WinXP or later as they needn't be installed in the c drive.
I hope you get the picture:
*img405.imageshack.us/img405/2416/picnd9.jpg

i thought u would be explaining something else to me, made u right such a big post :( sorry, anyways thanks for it, this might help others if they hav probs with bad sector.

i hav been using Quick format to convert fat to ntfs is that a problem ?
which is better quick format or full format.
 

abhipal

Journeyman
The formating the hard disk (full fromat) is directly prop to risk. The more you format more is the risk. vice versa.
 
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