Originally Posted by
BigLar
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.
Well, drives have become more dense so each track is spaced much closer together and hold many more bits per radial inch or whatever measure. Given that 5 MB drives used to live in cabinets and had at least 8" platters if not more.
Fortunately there have been smart (or integrated) controllers for 2 decades so one doesn't have to enter the number of heads, cylinders/platters and ... tracks for each drive, as well as known errors.
Do most of the 1.8" and 2.5" drives these days just have 1 or 2 platters with 3-4 heads?