[ars]

You probably would not get rust anyway, so stove drying isn't hurting anything much.

But it's certainly not helping.

The methodology was not complicated: I washed some porous/rough metal under the faucet, dried it with a paper towel, then put one piece in the oven at 170F, one on the table.

[learc83]

170 is below the boiling point of water, it may speed up evaporation but it won't boil off.

300-400 (what you'd get from the stove top) is above the boiling point, so the water rapidly boils off.

These 2 things aren't comparable.