Not sure this is correct, or if we're saying different things.

1. You have one partition, 120 GB, the entire drive, NTFS.
2. You want to make two partitions, one, say, 10 GB FAT32, the rest as NTFS.

I have tools that will supposedly dynamically change the size of the original partition to allow room for the other one, but it seemed easier to just destroy the partition and build from scratch. It worked fine, it just took a long time for the formatting of the large partition.

If these tools work (and I don't know if they're included in Windows), then, yes, it would have been easier to just shrink the partition to make room. Presumably, this would not have entailed loss of data, either. Otherwise, it's kind of a useless tool.

Re: 2hrs/TB on a SATA drive. I've never formatted a SATA drive, but except for the interface the inner workings are pretty much the same, no? That is, there's a spinning platter and a head that zips around the surface. This is all mechanical, and I think that would be the limiting factor in getting the proper data on the proper tracks, not how fast it gets data from the outside world.

If I'm looking at 220 minutes to format 120 GB, that's 4000 times the size of my old 30 MB drive. If the speeds then were the same as they are now, a format on that old drive should have taken no more than about 3-4 seconds. Clearly it did not, indicating hard drive mechanisms have gotten much faster.

Given the same data, a TB drive is about 8 times the size of my 120 GB drive, so in theory a TB drive should format in about 29 hours. If you can do it in 2 hrs, I'd really like to know what's going on that I'm not aware of.