Question Of The Day

[mtorbin]

Ok, without bring up bad history, the following is somewhat of a heated debate and I'd like to see what others think:

If you zero out a drive and reformat it every six to eight months, making sure you follow the proper procedures, can this adversely affect the drive, yes or no?

Just curious where others stand on this issue. I won't give my opinions just yet.

- MT

[realityisterror]

that's too much wear and tear and just unnecessary. why would you want to risk overworking and shortening your drives life span by doing that? i think it would be ill-educated to do something like that...

reality

[javabear90]

so I guess windows dying every 4 weeks and having me reformat my drive is not a good thing right?? O and not to mention having to fdisk it when windows only reads 1/256 of the drive.....

[blue&whiteman]

why reformat when you don't need to? its not a matter of how much time has passed since the last one, its a matter of if its needed or not.

[Westside guy]

I think it's rather unnecessary in most cases - but it can't be a source for a significant amount of wear and tear on the disk, given the interval you're talking about. Just think about the number of accesses on any part of the disk in this procedure; then compare it to likely day-to-day usage.