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formatting

E

EternalTL2k3

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 26, 2005
22
0
I am relatively new to the mac world so forgive me for my ignorance in my question in advance

Every 6-10months my computer usually slows down and I format it which helps tremendously. I have been thinking of doing the same to my ibook and was wondering if its wise to do so? I have been told that formatting damages the hard drive or something to that effect. I haven't had any problems with my ibook but just wondered about it
 
First, absolutely not--formatting a modern hard drive is no different from writing a bunch of data to it. Absoutely impossible that it would cause any damage. I'm curious as to what poor, misinformed soul put the idea into your head--that's not an urban legend I'd heard before.

Second, while I've heard of a lot of people needing to do the same to keep Windows running properly, I've NEVER seen this as any sort of necessity with a Mac. That's not to say that problems can't crop up that require an archive and install, but if the computer is not noticibly misbehaving, don't worry about it.

If you had a hard drive that was nearly full, moving all the data off of it, reformatting, and putting it all back on does completely defragment the hard drive, but unless your drive is nearly full and/or you're constantly creating and deleting very large files (as in large Photoshop scratch files or several gigabyte video temp files you edit then delete), the chances are the disk isn't anywhere near fragmented enough for this to make any measureable difference.
 
thanks for the reply. It clears up a lot of things for me including that ruining that HD comment i've heard. Recently I have been transferring lots of files back and forth from my PC to ibook. I have a lot of files from school that I put onto my PC and then move to ibook for studying purposes or large graphic files for research and when i'm done, I either delete or move. Since the HD is only 30GB and the files are semi-large this creates that fragmentation problem for me

Thanks again for the advice
 
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