Format or not to format?

[Psi*]

I recently purchased 2 Samsung 1TB HDDs from Newegg. These were purchased about a month apart ... driven by when 2 drives I had failed.

The 1st is a 7200 RPM the 2nd is a 5400 RPM green drive. I partitioned each drive for 16 GB "C" & evenly split the rest into two ~460 GB partitions.

I quick formatted the 1st drive's partitions & have been waiting for some complaint, which has never happened.

Today I finally got the 2nd system back up & did full format on the large partitions. Hours later, I realize that I have never formatted a drive this large before. as this took hours. A little googling around & those who have opinions seem to think that a full format of a new drive is completely unnecessary.

Thinking about this & experience many moons ago, I am inclined to agree. Several years ago new drives needed to get a low level format which was the "real" format. The low level did the 1st write ever to the drive and created a block of information indicating bad sectors. The "full" format that I did today is only a sector scan & validation (I think), so it is not much more than the Quick Format but tests the drive for bad blocks/sectors.

So I believe that I wasted a few hours, but it done finally. Anyone know or remember a little more about this?

 

[Rob Williams]

Today I finally got the 2nd system back up & did full format on the large partitions. Hours later, I realize that I have never formatted a drive this large before. as this took hours. A little googling around & those who have opinions seem to think that a full format of a new drive is completely unnecessary.

A quick format is all that's needed for most people, regardless of whether the drive is new. A full-fledged format isn't going to render data unrecoverable, which is a problem if that's what you're going for. There's not going to be a performance hit, either, since regardless of file system, the data isn't going to be truly gone (you just can't see it)... it's going to be overwritten whenever data needs to be written in the same position.

The full-fledged format is a waste of time in any scenario I can think of. The only time a non-quick format should be used is if you are selling the drive. In that case, the best option is to run a tool to write zeros across the drive multiple times. Running a tool like HDD Erase after the fact to remove previous partition information and the like might not be a bad idea, either.

I think that full formats back in the day may have made more sense. But our OS' are much smarter today, and they're going to take care of properly initializing a drive, as well as dealing with whatever else needs to be done.

 

[2Tired2Tango]

The "full" format that I did today is only a sector scan & validation (I think), so it is not much more than the Quick Format but tests the drive for bad blocks/sectors.

So I believe that I wasted a few hours, but it done finally. Anyone know or remember a little more about this?

PSI... you are correct. The NTFS "Full" format is a surface read/scan followed by a "Quick" format to write the partition table and NTFS data to the disk.

I generally use quick formats unless I have reason to suspect the drive is getting flakey. Full formatting a 1tb drive would be torturous... and think of my customers reaction to the bill after I sit for 5 hours, twiddling my thumbs.

You will gain much better drive diagnostics by enabling SMART in your Bios. This forces a "power on diagnostic" every time the drive is powered up. It takes about 5 seconds but it will reveal hidden problems no format or chkdsk will ever find.