re: formatting HD and its' effects...

AFAIK, reformatting has little effect on your hard drive as far as life expectancy is concerned. Note that I said
little, and not no. As Joey_Batch_File pointed out, there are third-party progs that will do successive
wipedowns of your harddrive. That said, regular usage itself might be more hazardous to your drive, not to
mention system performance, if you're not doing regular maintenance, like fsck/scandisk, defrag, etc. If you check
the manufacturers' website, you'll probably see lifetime expectancy information regarding your particular model.
There are so many others factors involved besides formatting such as h/w type (IDE or SCSI), operating environment,
abuse, Quality Control (or lack thereof) and many more that you have to take into consideration.
Just remember, there's no such thing as a silly question (as long as it's reasonably silly ).
Keep it up...


zaddikim