I have Ubuntu and Fedora Linux distributions on my computer. I try to tweak many things in both of them and many times mess things up. So I normally reinstall the OS to fix it (as a last resort).
In the past two weeks I have reinstalled almost 10-12 times. Will this affect my hard disk? Will the life of my hard disk be shortened if I do this frequently? Will the hard disk crash sooner I continue to do this?
Hard drives have a rating called "annualized workload rate" which specifies how much I/O a hard drive is designed to handle per year; exceeding this limit may reduce the life of the drive. Enterprise hard drives can often cope with 180 TB of I/O or more per year, while consumer hard drives are typically only designed to handle up 55 TB a year. For an example, see this datasheet for the consumer-grade Seagate Desktop HDD.15.
However, your usage profile does not appear that it would exceed this limit. Reinstalling the operating system involves writing up to a few dozen gigabytes of data to the hard drive, yet it would take an average of 150 GB of I/O per day every day to exceed this limit.
I can't see this being a problem with a mechanical hard disk, i.e. the kind with platters that spins.
On an SSD it might be an issue, but even then probably not as long as you aren't zeroing out the drive between installs.
