I have started having problems with one of my older hard drives, and it got me to thinking about this. Whenever you format a drive that was formatted in NTFS to some other file system, say RiserFS or ext3, there is a warning that it may damage the drive.
I was wondering about the actual validity of this statement. I have been expecting my drive to fail for some time now due to its age (4-5 years old I believe), and it does seem to be showing its age. However, only recently has it been showing signs of its age. I was wondering if this may have partially been caused by the several times being written as NTFS and the others.
Just fyi, the symptoms are extremely slow loading from it, and just today it started dying on me while in use. This may be related to something else, but the system suddenly locks up, then restarts itself. When it POSTs it doesn't see the drive and isn't able to access it until after I jiggle its connections a bit. Of course, the slowness may be related to its 5400Rpm and its 2mb cache.
Don't worry, just ordered a new drive with more than 6x the capacity. Not to mention 16mb cache.
Question is, will the frequent reformatting actually lower the life expectancy of my drives? I would appreciate any knowledge that anyone can give me.
I was wondering about the actual validity of this statement. I have been expecting my drive to fail for some time now due to its age (4-5 years old I believe), and it does seem to be showing its age. However, only recently has it been showing signs of its age. I was wondering if this may have partially been caused by the several times being written as NTFS and the others.
Just fyi, the symptoms are extremely slow loading from it, and just today it started dying on me while in use. This may be related to something else, but the system suddenly locks up, then restarts itself. When it POSTs it doesn't see the drive and isn't able to access it until after I jiggle its connections a bit. Of course, the slowness may be related to its 5400Rpm and its 2mb cache.
Don't worry, just ordered a new drive with more than 6x the capacity. Not to mention 16mb cache.
Question is, will the frequent reformatting actually lower the life expectancy of my drives? I would appreciate any knowledge that anyone can give me.