2007-01-31 21:02:16 · 3 answers · asked by partyguy20062001 1 in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Other - Hardware
There's no easy answer to this. Different models, different production runs, and different levels of use/abuse will all change the answer to this question a little bit. The most important thing to remember is that if you hear any loud and unusual noises (like grinding) coming from your hard-drive when you boot it up, you've got _maybe_ one more read left on that drive. To be safest, make sure you've got your important data backed up, but other things you can do are use the Disk Analyzer tool (it's part of the Disk Defragmenter, but tell it to analyze rather than defrag) and see how many sectors have gone bad on your hard-drive. If there's one or two, that's usually not a bad thing, but if they're popping up all over the place, go get a new drive and don't bother wasting time reformating the old one.
2007-01-31 21:17:17 · answer #1 · answered by the_amazing_purple_dave 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Floppy disks, which have a very old and bad design (compared to HDD) and clumsy mechanism, can be formatted dozens of times without problem, so I guess HDD can be formatted at least that much.
2007-02-01 05:15:27 · answer #2 · answered by ManOfSteel 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Like you said until it crashes if done that many times already get another one and clone it and be ready for the crash.
2007-02-01 05:07:54 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋