Formatting Hard Drives
 

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!

Can't use Format command in Win 7 so have to use the disk mgmt snap-in tool.

Takes about 2 hrs/TB on a SATA drive that way.

If it's a new/OEM install and quick format is an option, I would consider it for a clean install. If it's a system crash & rebuild, I always do a full wipe and then a full format, it's PITA but with SATA drive, it's not too bad as while that system is running & connected to a spare monitor, I'm usually on my main desktop or laptop doing other things so I'm not "wasting" time.

One of my bro-n-law's Dell XPS crashed after some sort of malware hit, recovered & clean it but still behaving strange, sweeps came up empty but I said, let's just do a bling bleep bang - it will take time but I don't want to be doing "pro bono" again in a few moments - system had outdated security products running Vista. Disk Manager won't shrink partition beyond 10GB so that I can split things up -long story short, it's now running Win7 with OS on C: and rest on D: - better than when it was new. Besides, the tablet also help keep me occupied as I also take advantage of time to run major tune-ups and maintenance, cleaning up cloud storage & organizing all those DVD's & USB drives.

What's worst is that even after Win7 SP1 is installed, it's still time-consuming to install all those patches & security updates, etc. - and the numerous reboot in between the device drivers, as much as I try to slip everything together onto the USB boot device ...

there's no need to reformat the drive to partition it, although you will lose the data on it (unless you do a live partition).

as for a surface scan, it's a waste of time. drives automatically remap bad blocks. a better way to test the health of a drive is with smart utils, although it too is no guarantee.

Disk Management also lets you quick format. Takes about ten seconds.

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.

no magic here

quick format = erase the file index table
full format - go through each sector of the hard drive

No need for full format, unless you want to do preliminary check for bad sectors

Yes, we all know that.

The problem is, as far as I know, that when you change the partition size, the indices (or FAT table) no longer point to the right places.

Not knowing much about NTFS internals, I'm on shaky ground here. But I've always based decisions on the idea that re-sizing a partition (especially moving the beginning) will require a new format. Because of the times involved, there may be tools so this can be avoided. But, it was getting late and I had a lot of other work to do, so I just took the slow-but-sure route.

Still - the whole point of the post was not what stupid thing I may have been doing, but the fact that a full format on a sizeable drive can take a very long time. If you haven't done a full format in a long time (or ever), you might not be aware of just how time-consuming the process can be! Thank god manufacturers provide drives pre-formatted ... don't they?

The last time I had to do a rebuild on the RAID it took a full two days to build.

This in itself wasn't so bad (read: I expected this from the last time), but I had to do it because the NAS was finding errors (Current Pending Sector) on the disks that it couldn't fix, but which turned out to be imaginary (i.e. a long format in windows not only cleared the CPS errors but didn't reallocate the sectors, so they all were fine). But if one of those disks died, the whole thing would go, so I needed to fix it.

So of the five disks, three had these errors, requiring three long-formats in Windows of 1.5 TB disks (the NAS is old and even 1.5 is pushing it with size).

By the end of the process I'd lost four days. Then another three days copying files back. from various backups. Fun fun.

And since it's a RAID drive the preformatting doesn't help, so I just hope I don't need to do it again any time soon.

That or fix current pending sector faults. Thankfully it works, because these were not the first, but they were the first I refused to RMA.

Yikes! Makes my problems look trivial.

Don't understand this. My RAID server is just a couple of NTFS-formatted drives (RAID 1). Not sure what you're using and why pre-formatting doesn't work.

I think he means that the RAID controller needs to do its format magic on both drives to meld them into a RAID volume, so simply formatting each individually doesn't get the drives into the state they need to be in for them to be in the RAID volume.

You still have to format the array to ensure the drives are in a consistent state.

If you were to format a 20 mb disk, it probably would still take five or ten minutes. 120 gb is a bit larger, so of course it's going to take more time.

My NASes are the same way -- the NAS has to do its own format of all the drives, regardless of their state when installed.

In fact, I think this is how all RAID controllers work. :)