Hard drives, or hard disk drives (HDD), are devices that allow you to store a large amount of data. If you do a little research on the technology of the HDD, you will find out that it has not really changed much. The designs they used in the 1980s are very much the same designs they are using now.

The only differences are that the reliability has improved, the capacity of these devices has grown exponentially, the form factor is continually shrinking, and the prices are dropping. Manufacturers do not produce proprietary hardware that can only match another set of products. The storage industry has been very universal.

It is not the HDD that differs, but the operating system (OS). OS is generally the basic software required for the computer to run and manage the system and other applications. These different OS use different file formats. Although there are different file formats, they are generally accepted in your HDD. In order for your OS to recognize that you have a HDD, the HDD has to be formatted in the same format as the OS, or else no matter how large your HDD is, it would be rendered useless, since it would not be seen by your OS. That is the reason why you would have to format a new HDD, because you would have to set the format of the HDD the same as the file format that you are using in your system. There is a software program called an emulator. This software would allow you to run a copy of a different format on top of another format in one HDD. These are usually used by software developers.

It is not common practice for you to format your hard drive over and over again. The only time when it is really necessary for you to reformat it is whenever your OS is encountering irreparable problems or if your computer has been infected by a virus.