Does dual booting cause any harm to HDs over time?

[auhlixer]

I am asking this cause my HD died 2 weeks ago. The apple store and applecare thought it was the logic board but it was the HD.

I was using 3D modeling programs Inventor, 3D studio, AutoCad etc...

MBP 2.16ghz
2gig Ram
100gig HD 7200rpm

What I am thinking of doing is booting windows off a external HD.

 

[MRU]

You can think about booting off an external HD, but i'm affraid you'll be thinking for a while... As far as I'm aware there is no way of installing Windows on an external drive. You can install OSX to the external drive and have windows on your main drive but that's it.

There was someone posting they had found a way, but everyone who tried to do the same failed, so i'd say it was BS.


Dual booting is just partitioning, it shouldnt do any damage long term to your HD or logicboard. If they are going to die, they will do regardless. I know my powermac G5 logicboard just died

 

[electronboy]

Why would a dual boot configuration negatively effect a hard disk? If your hard disk failed it was a failure of hardware, not software.

 

[savar]

Why would a dual boot configuration negatively effect a hard disk? If your hard disk failed it was a failure of hardware, not software.

There's a sustained period of above-average disk activity when you boot an OS, especially a modern OS.

Still I don't think it would make a drive fail after a couple of months. But if you switch OSes several times per day then yes you could subtract maybe 10% of the HD's life...thats like 1-2 years off of a 10-15 year lifespan.

 

[7on]

There's a sustained period of above-average disk activity when you boot an OS, especially a modern OS.

Still I don't think it would make a drive fail after a couple of months. But if you switch OSes several times per day then yes you could subtract maybe 10% of the HD's life...thats like 1-2 years off of a 10-15 year lifespan.

probably the same as rebooting several times a day with one OS