Hard drive formatting

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I have a question about formatting hard drives. I have heard from some people that you can only format a hard drive so many times before it wears it out and it won't format anymore making the drive worthless but other people say that's not true and that it's just like writing and re writing files on a hard drive. I was wondering if anyone here happened to know anything about that or if formatting is a bit different from just re writing files in a way that you can only do it around a certain number of times to a hard drive before it can't be re formatted anymore. One person told me that the average hard drive can take about 20 re formatting cycles before it won't work anymore but I'm not sure if that is true or not. If anyone knows anything about that I'd love to find out about it. Thanks.

Its a myth. Format on my son!

If your subsequent formats are quick formats then it should be fine. There's no need to do full formats and that puts excess wear on the drive. I don't think you could wear out a drive by formatting it though unless you were trying to wear out the drive.

I've seen drives not format out of the box...I've had a couple for years & years... they've been formatted a ton of times I know I have one that's either at the 20 mark or way beyond...go ahead and format.

When you casually format a drive, you simply delete certain chunks of data and write new ones. There's nothing that special to it.

Low-level formatting, however, is something else. That does something serious to the drive, but there's almost no reason for you to ever do one.

A full format (the kind Windows Setup does) certainly puts extra wear on the drive, but nothing serious.

its true. you can only format a hard drive so many times (I know from experiance) but its more like 40-50 times you can format them. After a while they loose their magnetic ness. But that takes at least 10 years+

Technically it is true but your talking a lot of times even more than solid state I think, genral use would do the same. But the hard drive would start to degrade natrually way before this is ever likely to happen especially the old ones.

Format as much as you like.

Btw format does mean nothing can be recovered. If you throw away your computer it could end up in Nigeria or anywhere. There was a case on the news about UK credit card details been taken of salvaged HDs sent to Nigeria. You need a shredder program to remove all data.

personally i would take a sleg hammer to the hard drive before getting rid of it

A small hammer to the logic board on the drive is good enough.

If you really wanna be thorough, open up the thing and pour saltwater in there. Instant corrosion.