Remember the old days? There we were with our 20 or 30 MB HD's, running DOS or Win 3.1, and we'd get some sort of screwup, and we had to re-format the drive. Or, we bought a new one and it came raw, so we had to format it. No big deal - boot from a floppy, type "format c: /u /s" and away it would go. 5-10 minutes later, it was all done and we could re-load our apps/data.

I hadn't formatted a hard drive in ages. Today, I'm putting together a small system and I'm using a 120 GB drive. I had to partition it, so the big partition was about 110 GB. When you do this, you have to destroy the original partition, set up the new ones, and do the actual format.

Three hours and forty-five minutes for the format and surface scan.

If you have a nice terabyte drive and are thinking of re-formatting it, think again. Unless you have a lot of time on your hands.

And when Windows gives you the option of a 'quick format', take it!