你的电脑有一个巨大的硬盘驱动器，你显着使用不足。减小主分区的大小实际上会增加驱动器的寿命吗？

今天的问答环节是由SuperUser提供的，SuperUser是Stack Exchange的一个分支，是一个由社区驱动的问答网站分组。

问题

超级用户读者Chazjn很好奇，如果不充分利用他的磁盘空间，是否真的会延长驱动器的寿命：

I have a used 3TB SATA hard drive kicking around that I am planning to use as a replacement in a Win 7 box.

I don’t need all this capacity so was I thinking if I format it to 1TB I would increase the reliability. My thinking behind this is based on the following thoughts:

• There would be more physical ‘breathing space’ between each sector/track.
• When bad sectors are found, there be a larger pool of unallocated sectors to bring into use.

Are my assumpti*** true?

If my assumpti*** are not true then what happens to all the unused space? Does the hard drive still format to the same physical dimensi***; thus would my 1TB drive still be squeezing sectors onto the platter as if it were formatted to 3TB.

Many thanks!

那是怎么回事？他关于少用磁盘的理论成立吗？

答案

超级用户贡献者Mokubai介入并推翻了这一理论：

Your assumpti*** are wrong.

The drive has a fixed physical format that is made up of physical sectors, in your case totalling 3TB. By formatting the drive you are effectively clearing the data in those sectors but you are not rearranging them or changing their physical size or layout in any way whatsoever. By formatting at a lower capacity you would simply be wasting the extra space, it would exist but would simply not be being used foranything at all.

Formatting does not change the physical sector size nor space between tracks.

As to unallocated sectors, I believe that drives have a preset number of reserved sectors for reallocation and the drive has no way of telling whether sectors are used by the operating system. SSDs do have a feature called “trim” that can tell the drive the sectors are clear to be wiped but this is something slightly different, spinning platters lack any kind of similar feature. Un-formatted sectors would not be used for bad sector reallocation.

By formatting a 3TB drive as 1TB you are simply preventing yourself from using 2TB of space and thus wasting 2/3rds of what you spent on the drive. Your 1TB partition would be sitting in front of 2TB of empty space.

虽然格式化/分区不会延长驱动器的使用寿命，但您仍然可以通过为操作系统/应用程序创建一个分区和为数据创建另一个分区来充分利用分区。如果操作系统出现问题或完全重新安装操作系统，您的数据将安全地存储在驱动器的单独区域中。

有什么要补充的解释吗？在评论中发出声音。想从其他精通技术的Stack Exchange用户那里了解更多答案吗？在这里查看完整的讨论主题。