Can a hard disk last for atleast 5 years, even if it has been reformatted for 5 times?

Question

I want to know, say, I have reformatted my hard disk for 4 to 5 times, so how long can I expect my hard disk to last

Answer 1

Hard drives have moving parts and will be subject to failure much sooner than computer components with no moving parts.

Formatting has no significant negative effect on a hard drive. It does on your data, but not your hard drive. I've got drives 10 years old (small at this point - 2GB... 500 MB drives) that still work find and they've been formatted a number of times. And I've bought brand new drives that were Dead on Arrival (DOA). When a drive fails is, in many respects, unpredictable. Usage will contribute to the drive's ultimate demise, but for average home use, the AVERAGE drive should last well beyond the warranty period.

(I bought a drive a few years back - 120 GB - and used it literally CONSTANTLY for 6 months - the read/write heads were idle probably no more than 1 day out of 6 months. Then it died).

If you want to protect your data from the possibility of it being lost, you need to back it up. Use RAID (it's fairly cheap nowadays - costs as little as $20 + another drive of equal or larger size), and use a UPS to plug your computer into - a power strip is NOT a UPS - you want one with Automatic Voltage Regulation (cheap APCs do not have this - cheap Belkin's and expensive APCs do).

Answer 2

Reformatting a drive has nothing to do with life expectancy of the drive. In fact, it might actually help.

Things which contribute to diminished life are power surges, heat, how much work it has done, (ie..how much data it reads/writes), how fragmented the data is and total number of hours running.

It's not at all uncommon for hard drives to last 5 years with normal use.

Answer 3

most hard drives will outlast the life of the computer but there are always a few lemons out there. formatting doesn't have any affect on how long the drive will last