Never reformatted here either. Just keep it clean with a simple antivirus software and CCleaner. Always in tip-top speed!

ya me too lol

I've been running about 3 or 4 years. Everything is working so I'm not going to do anything. I run Win7 and thought about upgrading to 10, but not going to do it. I have a lot of programs that wouldn't run when I tried upgrading to Win8, so I'm leaving this main machine alone. I used to do clean installs every time a new OS came out, but pretty much don't care anymore and will just upgrade if shit works. But I don't have the time and patience to see if all my software works with a new OS. I also use an SSD drive, but only for about 2 years, then I clone it and install a new one. Don't trust them for more than 2 years.

I just had one die last Friday, and am working off my junk machine now. It wasn't like a failing HDD where you can often tell that it is going to happen. One minute it worked, the next it was gone. :(

I am not great with hardware, and I'm not sure what to get as a replacement. It was set up as a RAID, and I'm not sure how that impacts things.

But that is my technical tale of woe for the day. To answer the OP question, only when absolutely necessary. Setting up all my programs is too much of a PITA.

Since the advent of virtualization, a whole lot less.

Depends on the raid array you have set up, if it is mirrored or raid 5 try replacing the bad drive and you might get lucky.

No, it was set up for performance, not redundancy. I have the OS installed on the functioning SSD right now. I need to replace the bad one, then see if I can retrieve any data.

Fun times.

Thanks for the input though. It is much appreciated!

I totally understand you. I am the morning type. Sometimes I reformat the drive twice each morning... On good days do one in the evening too...

Anyway, formating hard disk with today's file systems is not something which is necessary. FAT and FAT32 were file systems which had benefits from re-formating. NTFS is much better and with defragmenting from time to time, you can do enough maintenance on file system itself.

Windows is story for itself, but something for registry clean and maintenance, antivirus and malware plus taking care could make your windows install once in computer lifetime. If is necessary to install windows again, it's enough to do it in new directory

Free space is big problem. Adobe products make huge cache (and plenty of people here are using at least one of their product so you know what Bridge can eat in few days only). Some other software eat space too. Couple of day I found that NetLimiter made 5GB of logs in some 15 days I was using it (last year when I was in place where connection was breaking when upload was not limited). it was lost for year or so. I found it by pure coincidence. so knowing where software and what it's doing is maybe better thing than formating the drive and starting all over again

Never ...

I only reformat when my HD is dead.

You do know that 3.5" enterprise drives are usually mechanically very similar, or even 100% identical, to consumer level drives? Often the firmware is the only difference, adding extra features such as time limited RAID recovery.

Drive failure isn't the only thing to worry about...

I had a BIOS that quietly nabbed a bunch of sectors at the end of the drive to store a copy of itself (motherboard malware!), which ended up wiping out the encryption keys for several drives. The ironic thing is that I was putting them into this machine to restore data because of a drive failure in the main array, but it ultimately killed two sets of backups. Luckily I figured out what was happening before I connected my sole remaining backup.

Be paranoid. Be very paranoid. :helpme

I keep my system pretty clean and well defragmented, so unless something goes terribly wrong I normally don't need to do it often.