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Solve : lifetime of harddisk? |
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Answer» How many times can I format the harddisk during its life time ? As I understand it HD's don't die because of the all the reading and writing. It's because of the number of hours it's been spinning. The bearing can only rotate for so long, or something to that effect. Typical hard drive failure MODES: The main two:- Mechanical Failures: These include component failures related to the mechanics of the disk. Problems of this type usually relate to the spindle motor or bearings, such as motor burnout, "stuck" bearings, excessive heat, or excessive noise and vibration. Actuator problems would also fit into this general category. Head and Head Assembly Failures: The infamous head crash fits in here, as do other problems related to the heads: improper flying height, head contamination, defects in head manufacture, excessive errors on reads or writes, bad wiring between the heads and the logic board. Less common:- Media Failure: This class of problems relates to trouble with the platters and the magnetic media, formatting, servo operation and the like. This would include drives that fail due to read or write errors, poor handling, scratches on the media surface, errors in low-level formatting, etc. Logic Board or Firmware Failures: These are problems related to the drive's integrated logic board, its chips and other components, and the software routines (firmware) that runs it. The most common causes of head crashes are contamination getting stuck in the thin gap between the head and the disk, and shock applied to the hard disk while it is in operation. Don't BASH your computer! Be especially careful with portable computers; I try to never move the unit while the hard disk is active. What operating system are you using?QuickFormat would allow you to do it a lot more times. From my experience you can keep formatting until it fails... See the reasons for failure above. I never counted though...There is nothing special about formatting a disk, as far as the workings of the disk are concerned. Formatting is only a set of read and write operations; a format which takes half an hour will wear the disk out as much as, but no more than, downloading a file that takes that long, or, in fact, operating the computer for 30 minutes, with swap file, file indexing, whatever, going on in the background. Formatting sounds different from the other things you can do with a hard disk, maybe, because the SEQUENCE of write and read operations starts from the beginning of the disk and proceeds in a regular (not random) fashion until the whole disk surface has had a file system written on it, so you HEAR a regular tick tick tick which sounds different from the more familiar random movements heard during normal operation. And don't forget, when the bearings seize, stick the drive in a freezer and you should be able to recover all your data. |
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