Hi,

There are several reasons for format the OS.generally people format their OS every 6 months or per year.but can i know if we format the OS and hard drives partition several times in a week for a particular reason is there any harmful to disk drives or any other?any suggestion will be appreciated.Thanks in Advance.

I don't think people generally format their drives every 6 months or year. Why would you want to do that? If you run Windows, I can see the need, but not with Linux. You might wear out an SSD more quickly with this, but I don't know of any harmful effects on a hard drive, other than the total waste of time and electricity.

i too don't think,but it's depends on their needs.i run Slackware on my system.i don't know if they do then what happens so just for clarification i started this thread and also i think few people faced the any problem regarding this so i started this thread.any way thanks for your opinion sgosnell.

Technically, if you run a journaled file system (EXT4, JFS, etc.) or other integrity based file system (ZFS) you shouldn't have to worry about any problems other than a dying hard drive losing data due to bad blocks and sectors.

For Windows you shouldn't need to reformat, but you should defragment about every two to four weeks and also clean up the system cache and temporary files from time to time.

The only worry you really should have is bad sectors. If the drive is fairly old, just replace it.

Thanks Repear,i getting reply from you that what i want to know.Thanks.:

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.

It does NOT wear anything out in a HDD if that is what you mean.