Formatting Hard-drive

[RedRival]

I have a bad habit of reformatting my hard-drives everytime some vital files or corrupt or if my startup/bootup is slow. I know this is the wrong way out, because it's more preferable to repair than to format. But is formatting necessarily harmful to a hard-drive?

Will formatting your hard-drive too many times result in a shorter hard-drive lifespan?

Will formatting your hard-drive too many times cause reading of data speed to be reduced?

Will formatting your hard-drive too many times result in the loss of some memory or space?

Will formatting your hard-drive too many times affect the overall performance of a hard-drive?

edit:

i'm using the KillDisk utility to do a clean wipe, everything will be destroyed, so no files will be left behind.

Will using a good disk formatting utility allow the hard-drive to function even better after a full OS reinstall than after a standard reformat?

http://www.klboard.ath.cx/index.php?...pic=71042&st=0
by sharedholder.

thanks in advance for any good answers.

[LeGoMyFnLeg]

No no no maybe yes

[lynx]

No
No
No
No
No ?

Formatting is simply a method of indexing the sectors on the drive. It is simply a bit of data which is written to parts of the disk not normally accessible to software, and as such does no more good/harm than writing a file to disk.

There is no such thing as a 'good' formatting utility, but there are different formatting schemes. All Microsoft operating systems are capable of formatting the partition with the schemes they support (it would be a bit pointless supporting them otherwise). For example, Win98 does not support NTFS so it does not format NTFS, but it supports FAT32 and can format FAT32. Actually, there is an add-on to allow WIN98 to support NTFS, but I don't know how good it is.

Once you have decided on a scheme there is only one way to write the 'format' information (which is why it is called a format). You may find software which may perform the actual formatting slightly faster than the standard program, but the result has to be the same or the OS wouldn't know how to deal with it.

The most efficient format for Microsoft systems is NTFS.