Long-lasting Hardrive?

[phantom555]

How to improve the working of a hardrive potential?
Against viruses for internet users and also for general pc users.
Lets say that i have a IDE/SATA 180Gb harddrive. So after first OS install i make a partition of 30 Gb primary and the remaining 145Gb empty space. Then after a fair bit of usage suppose the primary partition gets affected say after a year. Then i delete the primary partition and in the remaining 145Gb i install OS.(and again make a partition of primary 30Gb and other remaining is 110Gb) So would this be a success?
Do any of you practice in making partitions and part by part making it usefull?

 

[brinks]

No, just reinstall the OS back onto the same 30GB partition and use the remaining space for other storage.

 

[strollin]

I personally don't re-install the OS on a machine very often and have machines running that are 8 years old that still have the original OS.

 

[MyGodAL3X]

If you see that it comes up slower than usual you can try to reinstall your OS, but failing that you don't absolutely need to.
And if you feel like you should, just reinstall on the same partition and use the other as storage like brinks indicated.

 

[Yami]

I personally don't re-install the OS on a machine very often and have machines running that are 8 years old that still have the original OS.

I admit that it will still work fine, though by then I would've done at least one reformat, since it would probably be easier by then to reformat than uninstall all the random programs that accumulate from eight years of use. My mum's Windows machine has a ten-year-old OS, which started as XP in 2001, then was upgraded to 7 when it was released. There's SO much rubbish installed on it, like drivers for phones that we recycled ages ago.

 

[carnageX]

How to improve the working of a hardrive potential?
Against viruses for internet users and also for general pc users.
Lets say that i have a IDE/SATA 180Gb harddrive. So after first OS install i make a partition of 30 Gb primary and the remaining 145Gb empty space. Then after a fair bit of usage suppose the primary partition gets affected say after a year. Then i delete the primary partition and in the remaining 145Gb i install OS.(and again make a partition of primary 30Gb and other remaining is 110Gb) So would this be a success?
Do any of you practice in making partitions and part by part making it usefull?

Why would you keep decreasing your space by not using the whole drive each time you format? You can re-use space, you know. You don't need to keep decreasing the larger partition by making it a 30GB partition and ignoring the previous 30GB partition.

 

[InfiniteLoop]

how did you upgrade from XP to win7? there is no direct upgrade path.

i think what the OP is attempting to ask, and i admit i don't know the answer but have my suspicions is this: if you take a hard drive and quarantine a section, say 60GB and do not use it, but then when it comes time to reinstall the OS and do it from a 30GB partition made from the original 60GB partition will that extend the life of the drive vs a "normal" use scenario? sorry for the runon.

i don't think that not using a portion of the drive will extend the life of a hard drive and in my years of tech work i have never run across someone who does it this way.

Why would you keep decreasing your space by not using the whole drive each time you format? You can re-use space, you know. You don't need to keep decreasing the larger partition by making it a 30GB partition and ignoring the previous 30GB partition.

he wants to know if that will produce a longer lasting hard drive since areas are being saved and then not reused.

 

[carnageX]

how did you upgrade from XP to win7? there is no direct upgrade path.

i think what the OP is attempting to ask, and i admit i don't know the answer but have my suspicions is this: if you take a hard drive and quarantine a section, say 60GB and do not use it, but then when it comes time to reinstall the OS and do it from a 30GB partition made from the original 60GB partition will that extend the life of the drive vs a "normal" use scenario? sorry for the runon.

i don't think that not using a portion of the drive will extend the life of a hard drive and in my years of tech work i have never run across someone who does it this way.

No, that wouldn't extend the life of a normal HDD. A normal HDD is mechanical and anything mechanical will fail. The platters are spinning and the read/write head is always moving back and forth, no matter if you have part of the drive used or "quarantined" or not.

The nature of HDD's is their space gets re-used; they're a magnetic medium so its just manipulations of that magnetic data. Flash based media, however, have a limited read-write amount and can die much quicker than a normal HDD because of this.

he wants to know if that will produce a longer lasting hard drive since areas are being saved and then not reused.

The drive is always being reused. When you delete a file, that space is just made available for re-use, and isn't overwritten until a new file uses that previously occupied space. Hence why there are programs like Killdisk, DBAN, etc to write 0's to the entire drive with multiple passes.

 

[Yami]

how did you upgrade from XP to win7? there is no direct upgrade path.

XP -> Vista -> 7. There's a video of someone upgrading from Windows 3.1 to 7 that way XD

 

[InfiniteLoop]

i'm glad the OP got his question answered, finally.

sometimes steering is what's needed.

XP -> Vista -> 7. There's a video of someone upgrading from Windows 3.1 to 7 that way XD

well why didn't you say so?

i would rather have my eyes removed with a spork than watch what sounds like a riveting video.