[Grasshopper 1]

Hi all , i'm new to computers so please go easy on me .
From what little i've read on this forum , you folks seem to know your stuff so here it goes .
My friend and I had a discussion about weather or not doing things like Antivirus scans every day or reformating your hard drive often , causes premature wear on your hard drive.
I don't know a lot about these things but it seems to me that you can't get something for nothing anywhere in life , so I think performing these tasks too often will increase wear on your HDD and shorten its life .
If someone could shed a little light on this subject it would be very much appreciated
Thanks,
Frank

[Ridenow]

We are always "easy" on the new people. Welcome.

Of course, every time the hard drive is accessed it wears. Defrags and scans would be considered normal useage. Unless they are done excessively they would not affect the "average" life of the drive.

[o770]

I guess even defragmenting and scanning, and formatting excessively wouldn't shorten its life, to a point you could say that the drive failed because you formatted it too much.

hard-disks must be the most durable component in a PC.


welcome Grasshopper 1.

[Blueacid]

Don't forget that the little heads that read the discs don't actually touch the surface - so the only thing that might fail from continual formatting would be the motors inside the drive.

[Beast Of Blight]

I've had a 512Meg IBM Deskstar that I've had for around 8 to 10 years, reformated it about three times a week and gave it a grand work out, I still give it a heavy work out almost daily and shes still purring along

[FTC]

Yep, definetly, I wouldn't count on format/scan/defrag wear as a factor. When you consider the activity that many production real life disks have (24 hours/day of couninous access), You will come to the conclussion that motors wear is not a significant factor in today's drives. (even when comparing IDE vs SCSI)

Regards
FTC

[DumpALump]

Anyone know if heat causes premature wear? I actually have two fans right in front of my hard drives.

[moonunit]

RE: Dumpalump

Anyone with an IBM GXP disk will know the answer to that....

A friend and I had a look inside a dead disk and the read heads were actually touching the platters and had left scored rings on it, and a fine powder all over the place. Ouch. Clearly read heads do touch the disk on occasion, but only in a fatal manner.

[Lance Thornton]

Welcome to the forums Grasshopper1!

As far as the harddrive question, there is a thing that the engineers figure when designing a product, called MTBF. Mean Time Between Failure is usually quite an exessive amount of time. There is always mechanical wear, but unless you purchase a cheap, used, or incorrectly manufactured hard drive, you should be ok. Some companies have higher reputations than others, just as in any other aspect of our lives. I encourage you to search the forums on which company is considered the best and go from there.

[FTC]

moonunit,

I own 2 GXPs and no problem... also used several others. As fas as I know only 75GXPs (and maybe 60GXPs) exhibit problems. newer IBM's 120GXPs and 180GXPs are fine.

Regards
FTC

[Grasshopper 1]

Sorry I took so long to get back to your forum.
Thanks to all who replied , the answers I got were not what I expected but thats why you ask people in the know.
Hopefully in the future i'll be able to contribute to your forum but for now i'll stick to reading and asking questions.
Thanks All.
Frank

[JPS]

WELCOME!

As everyone else hinted at, what you are describing falls under the normal patterns of wear and tear.

Things you can do to help prolong live include:

- Keep the HDDs cool (fans are your friends)
- Use as much RAM as possible to minimize swapping

And last but not least, backup your data on a regular schedule on the off chance you do get a failure!