I was just wondering on average how many times can a hard drive be formatted before you start to have problems with it. Because since I bought my maxtor 80 gb sata hard drive I'v had to format about 5 times. How many lives I got left? ;)

Formatting your hard drive will not reduce its life or the number of times it can be done . When you format a drive these days all you are simply doing is wiping the index to the drive which simply lets windows or anyother o/s write to the drive as it thinks nothing is there. What is actually happening is it is writing over existing data. To do a true format you need to perform what is know as a low level format (Maxtor have a floppy disk that will do this format) which depending on the size of your hard drive can take hours and hours. This low level format actually writes over every single bit of data on your drive with a 0 . And actaully returns your drive to the true state it was when you bought it

Well, I just learned something new ;). Thanks for telling me MRT