Does dd or shred commands only overwrite the data and the filesystem or do they change or modify the physical media of the hard disk? Because I know that I can format a hard disk millions of times without doing any harm to the media, but does using shred or dd harm the S.M.A.R.T. attributes of the modern hard disks or physical media or I can use these commands normally to format a hard disk to any filesystem?
asked Jul 4, 2015 at 17:44
1 Answer
They change the physical state of parts of the drive (changing the intensity of the magnetic fields in a mechanical drive and the amount of charge of the electronic fields of a flash drive), that's how those stuff even work, although I don't think that's your question.
The use of things also consumes them, but I don't think that's your question either.
There's no direct harm those tools do to storage drives, but refrain from running them constantly on flash drives, because their cells suffer from a limited number of possible program-erase cycles before break.
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your answer is very nice if you want some improvement please edit your post or leave it as it is. . Jul 6, 2015 at 16:13
ddandshredwill write to (nearly) every location on the drive. That doesn't hurt the drive more than any other write operation. For a traditional hard drive with magnetic platters, this is inconsequential. SSD and flash drives have a large but limited number times each location can be written to before they begin to fail. But if you need to really erase, that's what you need to do. Using things wears them out eventually, and not using them makes them worthless now.