bassmadrigal |
11-13-2014 07:16 AM |
Writing data to regular platter drives won't cause any issues. With SSDs, it is a bit more complicated, because flash memory can only be written so many times before it becomes unwritable. Most of the time, it will keep the information last written there as read-only, but sometimes the sector itself becomes unreadable. Because of this, constant writing on an SSD could lead to premature drive failure (with a regular platter drive, the likelihood of a lot of writes causing drive failure is negligible, because that platter does not have any limits on how often a sector can be written). The good news with SSDs is that limited number is really high, and it's constantly getting higher. Modern quality SSDs will outlive almost any usage scenario as they are able to write some crazy amount without failing (manufacturers claim like 20GB a day for 3 years minimum, but those tend to be fairly conservative and you'd like be able to do at least 10x that amount).
Now, how does this equate to formats? Depending on how you look at it, it doesn't. When you format a drive, it doesn't go through and zero the whole drive and make it blank, all it does is removes all the pointers to the data (think of a neighborhood, and rather than demolishing all the houses, which would take forever, you just remove all the street names and house numbers -- when you want to build a house, you just replace what's already there). The only data being "written" to the drive, clearing out all those pointers. Any SSD will be able to cope with constant clearings because of wear-leveling technology. So, formatting the drive, basically, won't cause any issues. Now, what happens after the formatting, ie installing a new OS, would cause more wear, but again, with most SSDs and all platter drives, it won't be a cause for alarm, even if you do it every week.
Others have posted about the actual idea of formatting OSs every so often, so I won't cover that part.
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