Help reformatting hard drive to NTFS

purple_spider

Hi, I wondered if you could help, does anyone know how long is it likely to take to reformat a 1TB external hard drive to NTFS?

I bought a Western Digital one http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-Essential-External-Drive/dp/B000W9RNOA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1253048552&sr=8-1 and I've been told that it was necessary so that I could create/store files over 4GB.

Only its been half an hour and although the lights flashing on the hard drive, the little bar on the formatting box has barely moved (its just a tiny green sliver) also is it ok to just leave it doing its own thing while I use other programs on my laptop/do something else?

x Thanks x

John_Gray

Think how long it would take to write 1TB's worth of data! The time taken to format a 1 TB drive will depend to a large extent on the slower of:

• data transfer speed between laptop and external hard disk (USB2 speed)
• how fast the hard disk can write data

Assuming we have to write 1 TB of data to format the 1 TB disk (bad assumption, but bear with me!)...
USB2 speed is 480 Mbps = 60 MBps, so for 1 TB that's 1,000,000/60 seconds which is about 11½ days. So that should be your worst case, assuming the disk can write data as fast as it is presented by the USB2 interface. You should be able to find the maximum rate at which data can be written to your specific hard disk, and compare it with the nominal USB maximum data rate.

I've never actually measure how much data has to be written to a hard disk to format it, but I would presume it is less than the figures I calculate above!

purple_spider

Oh my god! Hopefully it won't be quite as long as that :eek: its about 1/6 of the way through on the little bar now. I'm not very good with computers so I've no idea how fast anything is so I've just left it to its own devices hoping that if i'm not doing anything much on the computer (just checking occasionally) that it might go a bit faster!

John_Gray

I'd be interested in how long it actually took to completely convert the drive, if you'd be kind enough to post this after it finishes!

HTML200

Are you formatting the drive to NTFS, or are you converting existing data from FAT32 to NTFS?

If you're formatting it (and wiping everything on it) then you should be able to do a fast repartition and format and be finished in minutes.

HTML200

And if you're converting existing data without a backup (!!!) then I strongly advise you leave the PC alone and don't use it for anything else.

purple_spider

I'll post how long it took when its done, thought I think that might be a fair few hours at this rate!

It was empty when I started (its brand new only got it yesterday!) so I thought I'd do it before I put my files on it, so they are still all safely stored on my laptop

I just right clicked, and chose format - was that the right way to do it (i'm using vista) or is there another way?

edit - I'm formatting the drive... I didnt know you could format files (this is all new to me!)

Marty_J

If nothing else, it's a good stress test for the drive. I know people who perform a full format of any new drive, with the thinking that if it's going to fail, it'll fail during the format, and not in a few weeks when it's full of data.

John_Gray

purple_spider wrote: »

I didn't know you could format files (this is all new to me!)

And to me (because there's no such concept)!

You can delete a file and make it impossible to recover any file data from the area it has been occupying on a disk using special software, but that wouldn't be called "formatting a file".

GeoffX

I bought an external 1TB drive a few weeks ago and partitioned into about 100GB and 900GB. The larger partition took, if I remember correctly, about three hours to format as NTFS.

AHAR

The quick format option doesn't take long at all. The 'normal' format involves a check of the entire disk which is what takes a lot of time on a large disk.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302686