What is a hard drive made out of, is it metal shaving a layer of metal off when you format? Does this degrade the performance of the drive? I'm probably way off but I'm just guessing.Thanks for the help.

LOL --- no not at all. Formatting the hard drive just removes all traces of any files off the disk. It doesn't remove parts of the disk physically or degrade performance at ALL.

..........I think I'm sure it upgrade the performance of the drive.In my case it do.Regards,Cees

That's right, when you reformat, big pads clamp against the disk surface and grind off a bit of the metal. If you do it a lot, after a while you have to take it to a garage where the technician will tell you the disks are too thin to turn and you have to have them replaced at huge expense ... no, wait ... I'm thinking of disk brakes. Never mind.

The hardrive is a very polished magnetized disc that is coated with microscopic iron oxide like particles that that are manipulated much the same as on a magnetic tape.Nothing happens physically to the disc when formatting other than rearranging the

Nope!If there are files on the disk, formatting doesn't remove them. Formatting a previously used disk (hard or floppy) just overwrites the root directory and available space table with information corresponding to those of an empty disk. Utilities to recover the contents of those files are available. There are also utilities that overwrite the surface where the files are stored, making the files unreadable. That task is NOT acomplished by the format routines that come with MS DOS or Windows.