Is it advisable to reformat a new harddrive before use?

wazza

Have just bought an external hard drive. Is it advisable to reformat a new harddrive before use?

fwor

None of the new hard drives that I've bought have ever been supplied formatted, so I've never had any choice.

And I normally split a drive up into several partitions anyway, so - unless yours is pre-formatted with the right filesystem and you want just one big partition - you probably won't have a choice either...

The only other reason I can think of would be to try to re-check for bad sectors, but a normal format won't achieve that - IIRC you need to use the manufacturer's diagnostic utilities to force that (what used to be called a "low-level format").

kwikbreaks

The last external hard drive I bought had the backup software that came with it on the drive. If yours is the same and you want to try the software make sure you pull it off to somewhere secure before you do any formatting.

IMO there is little to no benefit in having multiple partitions on an external drive although I do keep windows itself seperate from my data on the main (internal) drive..

Regarding your question though - if it came formatted then unless you do want to partition it or want to use a different filesystem from how it was formatted there is no benefit reformatting.

andy2004

HI, as far as i remember most externals come pre-formatted to FAT32 unless the drive is for a MAC, and most people prefer to use NTFS when using with a PC, some internal drives however will need to be formatted before first use as they are not formatted due to the manufacturer not knowing if its going to be used in a PC or MAC, different filesystem.
So NO you shouldnt really need to format the drive unless after you plug the drive in it doesnt tell you the size of the drive.