Can a format or software setting damage a harddrive?

It is a question I have often thought about. I have seen a few others say that formatting or installing a certain OS ruined thier drives. I used to scoff at such an idea, as I did not see how software could damage the physical disks.

However, now I wonder. I had two WD 750g drives in raid 0. They were perhaps almost two years old. They never posed an issue at all, until I installed the RC of win7. After that I had corruption, and eventually had to have one RMA'd. Recently I had a cd-rom drive that I thought was bad. Lots of issues in win7, some in XP. After unplugging the suspected bad cd-rom drive, xp seemed happy. Then I noticed a s.m.a.r.t error.

So now I wonder, I bought 3 of those drives at the same time. The one that was never formatted by win7, it works great. The remaining one from the raid array I think is going to fail.

Could it have been a format or something about the OS that caused this? Has anyone experienced similar issues or have knowledge of this type of thing?

Sul.

 

Sometimes I get the impression that Win 7 is a little rough on hardware.

Looking forward to the responses to your question.

 

i always believe that is some underlying weakness in hd manufacturing that is exposed by normal operation/use. Formatting is one of such activities

 

I don't think so, unless you overstress your HDD?
Which could be possible i think