About how long to long format 500 GB My Book

[steverossiter]

Hi,

I wanted to format a new 500 GB My Book Essential USB 2.0 External to
NTFS and was curious as to how long a "long format" should be expected
to take. I am using the Long vs. Quick method this first time around
to catch any bad sectors.

My system:
Dell 8300 BIOS A07
1.25 GB RAM
2.8 GHz Intel
Win XP Pro SP 2

Would the overall time be greatly affected by my doing other tasks on
other drives while it is formatting? Does it matter if other USB
external devices are attached?

Thanks everyone, Steve

 

[David Vair]

I am going to guess around an hour, I just did a long format on a 250 and it seemed like a half hour
to 45 minutes but I didn't watch the exact time.

 

[Rod Speed]

Hi,

I wanted to format a new 500 GB My Book Essential USB 2.0 External to
NTFS and was curious as to how long a "long format" should be expected
to take. I am using the Long vs. Quick method this first time around
to catch any bad sectors.

Waste of time now with modern hard drives that do that stuff for themselves.

My system:
Dell 8300 BIOS A07
1.25 GB RAM
2.8 GHz Intel
Win XP Pro SP 2

Would the overall time be greatly affected by my doing
other tasks on other drives while it is formatting?

Depends on what those other tasks involve.

Does it matter if other USB external devices are attached?

Nope.

 

[Tom Scales]

I wouldn't bother -- never do.

Accidently did one on an internal 750gb drive and gave up and went to lunch.
Don't know how long it ran, but at least 90 minutes.

 

[Frodo]

I believe that the My Book uses the Western Digital hard drive.
Get the WD Data lifeguard tools (for Windows) and us it to format the hard
drive.
http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?swid=1
It's way faster to format a hard drive using the software available from the
hard drive manufacturer over Microsoft's formatting software.

Western Digital software for Western Digital hard drives
Seagate Software for Seagate drives
You get the picture?

I use Seagate's Diskwizard software for my Seagate drives.

 

[steverossiter]

It's way faster to format a hard drive using the software available from the
hard drive manufacturer over Microsoft's formatting software.

Thanks for this tip and everyone else for theirs, Steve.

 

[Tom Del Rosso]

Waste of time now with modern hard drives that do that stuff for
themselves.

But the drive needs to have a reason to look at each sector, no? The format
will give it a reason.

 

[Rod Speed]

But the drive needs to have a reason to look at each sector, no?

Nope, it keeps track of what sectors get accessed.

The format will give it a reason.

Pointless, use will do that fine.

 

[Arno Wagner]

But the drive needs to have a reason to look at each sector, no?
The format will give it a reason.

True. But if you want to do that, run a long SMART selftest
instead. The problem with the long format is that you will not see
problems the drive could correct. Basically the format-test will not
tell you anything, unless the drive has really serious problems. The
SMART self-test will, as it will also change the SMART attributes. The
drive itself will tell you how long it is expected to take for the
long self-test. Unfortunately you will have to remove the drive from
its enclosure and connect it directly via (S)ATA, since SMART
does not work over USB (the SMART stuff is not part of the USB
storage command set....).

Arno

 

[Sparky Spartacus]

But the drive needs to have a reason to look at each sector, no? The format
will give it a reason.

Not any more, that's done at the factory. Use quick format. I wouldn't
bother with a full format/scan unless I suspected there was something
wrong with the HDD.


As always, YMMV

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

True. But if you want to do that, run a long SMART selftest instead.

The problem with the long format is that you will not see problems the
drive could correct.

There is no such difference.

Basically the format-test will not
tell you anything, unless the drive has really serious problems.

Nonsense.
The offline test doesn't do anything more that the drive would do during
normal operations.

The SMART self-test will, as it will also change the SMART attributes.

So will any read/write action to the drive as long as SMART is active.

The drive itself will tell you how long it is expected to take for the
long self-test. Unfortunately you will have to remove the drive from
its enclosure and connect it directly via (S)ATA, since SMART
does not work over USB (the SMART stuff is not part of the USB
storage command set....).

Exposing you to the risk of killing it in the process.

 

[Tom Del Rosso]

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Tom Del Rosso



True. But if you want to do that, run a long SMART selftest
instead. The problem with the long format is that you will not see
problems the drive could correct. Basically the format-test will not
tell you anything, unless the drive has really serious problems.

What I had in mind was checking the SMART data after the long format -- not
expecting the format program to report anything -- but a long SMART test
will do the same I guess.

The
SMART self-test will, as it will also change the SMART attributes. The
drive itself will tell you how long it is expected to take for the
long self-test. Unfortunately you will have to remove the drive from
its enclosure and connect it directly via (S)ATA, since SMART
does not work over USB (the SMART stuff is not part of the USB
storage command set....).

Thanks.