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john smith
Asked: 2015-06-19 15:49:39 +0800 CST

Formatting Hard Drives Takes Ages

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I am formatting my hard drive using the "disks" utility. I selected my 3TB hard drive and chose the option not to partition it, but do a complete full erase (i.e. not the quick-erase option). It reckons that it will take 14 hours to complete. Can someone explain why it takes this long? In Windows it use to take about 5 seconds, but I have a feeling that it must not have truly formatted it or something.

format

3 Answers

  1. A quick format establishes the format of your filesystem which involves writing small structures to certain specific locations on the drive, but it does not write to the rest of the drive at all. This usually only takes a matter of seconds or about a minute, depending on the filesystem type.

    A full format does this but also wipes the rest of the drive. The speed of this can depend on the drive, and may take hours because it needs to, at least, write the full drive's capacity to the drive. In worst case, say it's a 3TB drive over USB 2.0, a full format would take around 20 hours. A fast internal 3TB drive may take less than 10 hours.

    New hard drives come with their entire surface ready-to-use and there is no longer any way to alter it this at a low level or to initialize it in any way. A full format is of doubtful benefit at any time: you may do one if you suspect problems with the drive surface (in which case a full format may detect some kinds of error) but even then there are better testing tools. A full format will wipe any deleted but recoverable data remaining on the drive but again if secure erase is your goal there are better tools for this.

    If you want your format to take only a matter of seconds, choose a quick format.

    Note: it's safe to interrupt a regular full format before it's finished and switch to a quick format.

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  2. I think that in windows you only rewrite some blocks, which are crucial to read the files and in ubuntu when you "fully rewrite" it could actually mean rewrite all the 3TB with zeros. You can check your disk's write speed and divide 3TB by it and you should get cca that much if my thoughts are right (or a bit less). But I'm no pro, so any answers covering this have a high risk of getting +1 from me :D

    Hope I helped at least a bit :)

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  3. Sometimes disk creator or gparted messes up my USB stick so I quick format it with:

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=1

    It is very quick writing 512 bytes to remove the MBR (Master Boot Record).

    In simple terms you changed count size from 1 to 6 billion. This is normally only done when you dispose of an old drive with financial secrets.

    You can safely abort the long format and restart with creating partitions only.

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