# Am i wearing out/damaging my hard drive?



## Cylan (Apr 1, 2007)

Im using a 1.8c GHz Macbook, 60GB SATA HD and 1GB DDR2 ram which i bought just 7 days ago from my school distributor.

now, i didnt really like the way my school had configured the Mac OS X, so yesterday,i decided to wipe the HD and perform a clean installation of Mac OS X.

In addition to that, i am a heavy user: i would work on it in the morning for about 3 hours in the morning and then shut down, on it again for about 2 hours or so in the afternoon and shut down again, and finally, one more time at night for about 7 hours before finally shutting down the system and calling it a night. In addition, i often perform disk scans like anti virus.

so now, the question is:just how much of my HD have i been wearing out within these 7 days?especially yesterday, where i spent about 14 hours on the system, including the reformatting and installation of Mac OS X into the MAcbook. And most importantly, is there anything i can do now to prevent the HD from wearing out even more than it already is,considering the amount of stress i put it during these 7 days?


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## Pensacola Tiger (Apr 23, 2006)

Cylan said:


> ...the question is:just how much of my HD have i been wearing out within these 7 days?especially yesterday, where i spent about 14 hours on the system, including the reformatting and installation of Mac OS X into the MAcbook.


The MTTF (Mean Time To Failure) for notebook SATA drives is in the neighborhood of 300,000 hours. If you were to leave it on 24/7, that is nearly five years of operation. I doubt that you have anything to worry about.


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## MSM Hobbes (Apr 23, 2004)

Turning on/off a computer places additional stress [thermal & mechanical] upon it. If possible, would recommend putting it into sleep mode instead of off/on.

Altho' as Pensacola Tiger mentioned, the average lifespan of a HD is very long. However, I would rather not due anything that hastens that day, such as turning the machine on/off.

BTW, what anti-virus app are you using?


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## Serge_N_Gin (Sep 7, 2004)

IMHO, it's possible that while you consider yourself a _'heavy user'_ ... you may just be underestimating the ability of your MacBook and overestimating what you consider to be heavy usage.

If anything, if your use of your MacBook is heavy, it is likely you will experience lots of _'hanging'_, possible crashes and many spinning beach balls ... the addition of more RAM could rectify that so I wouldn't worry so much that you are stressing out your HD and would also suggest that you let your MacBook sleep overnight and when not in use as a means to prolong its life.


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