The bottom line is: format a hard drive will not shorten its lifespan. Most people
tend to accept a false theory that frequent disk formatting will decrease the
longevity of hard drive. Formatting is not the cause of HDD failure. The slider
(read/write head) does not touch the platters in the formatting process. Thus
there’s no chance of physical damage on the HDD during formatting. On the other
hand, shaking a hard drive when it’s still working is the real cause in many HDD
failure cases. All in all, formatting has nothing to do with the physical damage on
HDD. You may even format a hard drive 20 times a day and it wouldn’t shorten its
lifespan.
The truth is: Defragmentation will put the scattered data together to some
consecutive sectors/parts of the platters. Thus the actuator arm will only move back
and forth on these consecutive sectors to read and write data after the
defragmentation. This can reduce the wear level of both actuator arm and
platters.
In this case, from the technical point of view, regular
defragmentation is good for prolonging the lifespan of actuator arm of HDD.
If your computer tends to crash periodically and frequently, then there is a big
chance that some bad sectors have been there on the HDD already. Read/write
repeatedly on bad sectors will definitely result in more and more bad sectors. The
reason why more bad sectors came up after each formatting, is only because that the
format program has detected the bad sectors which were undetected earlier.
Outage and low power do not damage hard drive at all. The HDD nowadays are driven by
electromagnetism. When power outage or low power happen, the read/write head will be
stopped at an appropriate position to protect the hard disk from physical
damages.
In fact, the platters will keep spinning after startup unless the user switches the
system to sleep/hibernation mode.
Diagnosis of Common Misconceptions
on Hard Disk Drive - Part 2