Does partitioning your external hd too much damage it?

You can probably erase and repartition thousands of times before wearing the surface off a hard disk.



-mj

Partitioning a HD subjects it to no more wear than writing to it for any other reason like saving files. The only thing being changed is the bits stored in the magnetic coating on the platter, which involves no physical contact or wear at all. So basically, you can partition it as often as you wish.

The same is not quite true of SSD's (solid state drives) -- their memory cells degrade slightly with each access so in that sense there is a tiny amount of damage done to them with each new partition (or any other) operation.

Solid State Drives (as opposed to Hard Disc Drives).
Basically the flash memory stick idea expanded to a full size drive.

for every "normal" HDD, you can partition as much as you like, it's basically the same as writing a file to it. I would rather ask myself why you feel the need to partition it all the time 😀

if you have an SSD, you know it because it's very expensive and very fast 😀 normal external drives you buy are all normal HDDs

What I mean is you won't wear away the surface of a hard drive or damage it in any other way by partitioning it, nor would you do that with anything else that writes to it. From the drive's perspective there is no difference between partitioning a drive & writing files to it in normal day-to-day use. To the drive, it is all just tracks & sectors, & it doesn't care what the OS tells it to write to them.

R C-R wrote:
it doesn't care what the OS tells it to write to them.

I've been telling it to write the Great American Novel
but it doesn't listen...



-mj

Did you try telling it, "0001000100101011101010101010110010101010100000011111111001111111"?

01010100 01101111 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01101111 01110010 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100010 01100101 ?

That is the question? It isn't the same to the drive, which will hear a logical statement, ya know. 🙂

Message was edited by: R C-R

01000001 01101000 00100000 01110000 01101100 01100101 01100001 01110011 01100101 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110010 01100101 01100001 01101100 01101101 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01110011 01110101 01100011 01101000 00100000 01110101 01110100 01110100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011 01101110 01100101 01110011 01110011 00100000 00111010 00101001

Errrmm . . .

I mean partitioning your hard drive just writes a few sectors into the partition table of the hard drive and then will probably be followed by a format of the newly created partition ..

Hard disks do not get worn out by such usage since this is well within their design objective ..

Answer : ===> You can re-partition and format your hard disk as you feel fit . How many ever times you like .. It's all good

Hope this helps 🙂