reformat

I have a NB that every day at the end of a day gets reloaded or cloned so the next working day I have a clean install to work from with no problems attached to the NB.

This doesn't cause a single problem with any HDD but if you where to perform a wipe & format every minute and have the HDD unmounted a sudden impact could destroy the HDD in question.

But provided that the drive doesn't get a bash a format is nothing more than the Read Write Heads reading or writing to the HDD which is exactly what they are designed to do.

Col

Excessive low level formatting (say 3x a day every day in a sub optimal environment) can certainly cause damage to an HD.

Standard formatting with sufficient cooling and good working hard drives shouldn't have any issues.