I format my hard drive when I think there may be something wrong with it. I recently did this to a drive I pulled out of one of my RAID arrays. It's been online since 2011. The RAID controller log shows that it's been throwing errors since September, but apparently these were recoverable errors and the drive wasn't failed. I just formatted it, but found no bad sectors. It also has no SMART warnings. I'll probably put it in one of my retro machines, because why not.

ETA: Update on this drive. It's been in continuous use over the Christmas/New Year holiday and is still flawless! (My annual backup: tarballing, compressing, encrypting, parchiving, and CRC-32 checking about 3 TB of data.) Mystery. I'm not going to put it back in the RAID array due to its age but will probably keep it as a permanent backup drive.

I usually only format my hard drives when the Vulcans show up at my house demanding I show them my pants collection. Every once in a while I eat ham sandwiches.

Op is not human. He's an AI programmed by Don Knuth that's attempting to fit in with non phds.

I have a CRON job set to do it on all my machines at 9 PM every Friday night. Need to keep the system tidy, after all.

Whenever the drive is going to be used as a boot drive in a different computer. For me, to do so for any other reason would be like stripping your car to repaint it.

Every second night, just after I had my shower. It's amatter of personal hygiene. A healthy body clearly requires you to clean up your self and your HDD at least once in two days. 🤣

To say the truth, I never formatted any HDD for years now, except for installing them in a system for the first time,

I'm formatting mine as we speak so I'd better hurry up and finish typing befor

format /q C:

Ai programmed by Don Knotts? Well gollee Andy, I never thought formatting your drive would lead to all this...

I recommend formatting every few days. In the case of a server running an AI the frequency should be much greater though.