Does writing many times to a HDD cause early failiure

Question

How many times could i run something like

dd if=/dev/urandom/ of=/dev/sda

before the hdd starts to suffer? I thought in a modern hard drive the head doesn't touch the platter, but i am still not sure. Could this be run like a million times. I mean, is there some upper limit? Thanks.

i know that wiping once or twice is considered unrecoverable but this is more of a theoretical question, hence the 'million times' thing. I won't run it a million times. — Daniel Gratz, Jun 29 '11 at 16:10
When I was in my first job, my boss once tried to convince me that you could destroy a disk's MBR permanently by zeroing it too many times. — Tom O'Connor, Jun 29 '11 at 16:12
Someone on a forum wrote: Some viruses read and write to the boot sector repeatedly, until the disk is damaged. A damaged boot second renders the disk useless to normal uses. — Daniel Gratz, Jun 29 '11 at 16:18

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 29 '11 at 16:19

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Could this be run like a million times

Yep, you can write to the same sector billions of times on modern magnetic disks, more so on enterprise-class disks than on consumer ones but yeah, SO many times that you'd get bored waiting for it to fail. This cannot be said for SSDs however, even on the newest and most expensive ones.

answered Jun 29 '11 at 16:19

Chopper3

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You're opening yourself up with "magnetic discs" there. After all, the source of much of the distorted information on this subject is in part the characteristics of _floppy_ magnetic disc media. M. O'Connor will be edified to hear that I've worn out track 0 of the odd _floppy_ disc in my time. (-: – JdeBP Jun 29 '11 at 16:51
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@JdeBP I don't think "*modern* magnetic disks" fits the description of a floppy very well. – vcsjones Jun 29 '11 at 17:04

Does writing many times to a HDD cause early failiure

1 Answers1