The destruction and preservation of primary porosity during burial diagenesis is an important part of the sandstone reservoir quality research, and their significance to the research of oil and gas geology is self-evident. Compared with the formation and preservation of secondary porosity, the factors affecting the destruction and preservation of primary porosity are with unique complexity and diversity. Based on the recent progresses from extensive documents, the paper tries to further understand the significance and effect of different diagenetic mechanisms on  the destruction and preservation of primary porosity in the sandstone reservoirs, such as the mechanical compaction, cementation, formation overpressure, grain coats, allochthonous salt and hydrocarbon emplacement. Currently, the new generation of reservoir quality models has  successfully predicted porosity and permeability in diverse sandstone reservoirs under many different burial conditions, which largely benefited from some important update of the destruction and preservation of primary porosity in modern diagenetic models of sandstone. However, this is just a milestone building accurate pre-drill reservoir quality prediction models, and there are still many problems in those models. The indefinite kinetics and processes of primary porosity evolution are  difficult problems to achieve more accurate  pre-drill predictions. The closer integration of the diagenesis, fluids, depositional processes and basin evolution may be one of most promising development directions of solving the destruction and preservation of primary porosity in the sandstone reservoirs in  future.