do partitions damage hard drives?

Soldato
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My query is do long term sustained partitions damage hard drives?
I ask this because i seem to have a lot of hard drives end up going faulty on me this problem has followed me through many builds, different hard drives and hardware configurations yet the only thing that has stayed constant is the fact that i ALLWAYS partition my main windows hard drive to have a 30gb C:\ drive and the rest for storage then my secondary drives are dedicated to video and games.
my computers never seemed to get bumped around or damaged either unless the missus is clouting the pc when I'm out :eek:

any help would be appreciated as my 80gb barracuda has just started to give off errors and i would really like to get to the end of this before i put another drive in to come to the same fate eventually.
 
I have always partitioned my windows drive with a 30GB OS partition untill recently I have now changed that to 40GB, I have done it with about 7 seagate hard drives - 2x 80GB (1 SATA), 160GB, 200GB, 300GB SATA, and 2x 500GB SATA's.

My first 80GB had some bad sectors after about 3 years but my old PC was quite unstable and would crash a lot and I put it down to that, that particular drive aswell as the 160 and 200GB have both been sold to friends and they said they have be fine (they must be about 4-5 years old now).

I cant see why partitioning hard drives would affect them.
 
No, partitioning has no adverse affect on hard drives. At the end of the day, a head seek is a head seek is a head seek. However, temperature very much can. What sort of temperature do your drives run at? (Use something like HDTune or SpeedFan or HDDTemp.) The max operational temperature for most drives is 55C (60C for Seagate 7200.10's), and the max operational temperature for most drives is 65C (70C for Seagate 7200.10's). Obviously you don't want to be running your drives at or beyond their operational temperature limit for extended periods or trouble is likely to ensue...
 
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