Hard Drive Maintenance

T

Tony Milman

Registered
My powerbook Hitachi drive gave up after only 6 months and has been replaced under warranty. The repairer advised that I should periodically re-format the drive to keep it healthy.

The periods between re-formatting depends (he says) on the amount of video rendering and could require a weekly re-format for a heavy user or perhaps 6 monthly for only an occasional user.

I have never come across this advice before and wondered what your views were on such routine maintenance? At the risk of being thick I wondered what the risk is of not follwoing this advice

Many thanks

p.s. sorry- I may have posted under the wrong forum......
 
I think this person should be beaten with a dead fish for giving out such bad information. Consider that if what he said was true, imagine how many times servers would have to be reformatted.

Maybe you should let the administration know of what this person told you. To give out that kind of information would make them look bad and I'm sure they would take the appropriate measures to prevent that from happening again.
 
Hitting your computer with a dead fish would do it far more good than reformatting the hard drive every six months.

I have been beating my G4 with a piece of haddock for three years (monkfish when its in season) and apart from the odd glitch it runs very well.

Don't think you are being thick. Users of this forum represent a very wide spectrum of Mac knowledge and in my experience the really knowledgeable ones are very patient and understanding of those of us who know less.
 
rhisiart said:
Hitting your computer with a dead fish would do it far more good than reformatting the hard drive every six months.

I have been beating my G4 with a piece of haddock for three years (monkfish when its in season) and apart from the odd glitch it runs very well.

Don't think you are being thick. Users of this forum represent a very wide spectrum of Mac knowledge and in my experience the really knowledgeable ones are very patient and understanding of those of us who know less.
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AcK!! :confused: My mistake...I guess I should have clarified.....sorry.

I meant that the person who repaired the hard drive and gave the misinformation to Tony should be smacked with a fish. I wasn't talking about Tony. He had no idea. All he was looking for was some help from the repair person, and the repair person just spewed out rubbish. Sorry for the misunderstanding. :(
 
Just being ironic dude. Brit humour I'm afraid (although I guess you sussed that).

Your reply to Tony was spot on.
 
rhisiart said:
Hitting your computer with a dead fish would do it far more good than reformatting the hard drive every six months.

I have been beating my G4 with a piece of haddock for three years (monkfish when its in season) and apart from the odd glitch it runs very well.
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héhéhé! :D
 
To echo what everyone else has said: absolutely ridiculous. It should not matter at all. If your drive died, it had nothing to do with anything like that.

That said, I actually DO think reformatting every few months is a good idea, but that's simply for performance reasons, NOT for the health of the drive. Disk fragmentation can build up over time and hurt your performance. From what you say he said about video usage, I agree (to a point) in regard to performance.

But there are a lot of variables involved in that. Many people won't get any significant performance boost anyway. Bottom line: Don't worry about it. If it gets to the point where you hear your disk grinding a lot and it slows down every time you access a file, then you'll know it's time to defragment. And the safest way to do that is to back up, reformat, and restore. (Also, if video files start playing choppily, that's often a sign of bad disk fragmentation.)

But again — and I can't stress this enough — this has nothing to do with the health of your drive.
 
Thanks guys for the re-assurance. I couldn't find the fish you refer to but did manage a tin of sardines. Just having some difficulty with the tomatoe sauce getting inbetween the keys!!!

As a convert to Mac there is so much to learn but I just don't want to go back to Windows.

This forum is a fantastic resource and I make a point of reading daily. It's amazing what you can learn from it.

Thanks again
 
rhisiart said:
Just being ironic dude. Brit humour I'm afraid (although I guess you sussed that).

Your reply to Tony was spot on.
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No, I figured that. :D But when I looked back I noticed how my response could have easily been misunderstood, which was why I replied back apologizing and explaining what I meant. :)
 
Tony Milman said:
Thanks guys for the re-assurance. I couldn't find the fish you refer to but did manage a tin of sardines. Just having some difficulty with the tomatoe sauce getting inbetween the keys!!!

As a convert to Mac there is so much to learn but I just don't want to go back to Windows.

This forum is a fantastic resource and I make a point of reading daily. It's amazing what you can learn from it.

Thanks again
Click to expand...

::ha::

Good to see that you are sticking with it. Once you go Mac... ;)

I have a love for Linux (specifically Slack), but I do enjoy using my Mac more than anything. :D
 
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