PCA Forums

OMG, there has Got to be a better way to format in the future, this takes FOREVER! fricken over 2 hours! I went to a damn MOVIE came back and it isnt done yet! WTF!

If there isnt a better way in the future, we are ALL in trouble, and so is the PC industry, cause no one is gana deal with this stuff! its nutz!

Greg

Why didnt you do a quick format?

cant o na fresh install. win2k btw.

Greg

then just give the drive to me.. ill give you a nice 2.1 gig that will only take 3 minuets to format.

or

i got a 850 meg drive that will take 1 min

me

hehe

Ok, well, to add to the bunch - I have a 10MB hard drive from my old Amstrad that I''ll trade ya for - probably format that thing in about 10 seconds.

Check and Mate :-p

i got a floppy for ya

me

I have one of those old 5.25 floppy's here somewhere that only writes to one side of the disk for like a whopping 600kb lol

hmm

GET BENT!

If I was gana do something liek that I have a ful lsize HD, one of them ones that takes up like 2 5.25 bays. It uses the wierd plug on the floppy cables that dont even exist anymore.

Greg

RAID reduces format times.....or at least in my experience.

However, nexus brings up a valid point. If we are going to spend massive amounts of money on big harddrives they need to format in a semi-decent amount of time.

They should come preformated.. heh.. Hows that for an idea? lol..

What about using the partitioning/formatting software that comes with the drive? The last time I formatted a Maxtor, I used it's software to partition and format in one step. On a 40 gig drive, it took less than 2 minutes, but I was using Win98. You would think that someone would have a "state of the art" software for formatting purposes.

yea, I dont know. Im not to keen on using hd mfg software. It is kind of like using drivers for mice. But maybe I should. Then again I dont have it anymore.

Greg

It's the software limiting the speed of the format, or the hardware itself, and the massive amounts of data (1s and 0s) or whatever it may be, that it has to write to the surface of the entire disc. But, I don't know much about that part.. I still think it wouldn't be hard at all for them to preformat the drives. They do sell a tool (I think I saw it in MaxPC) that will format the drive for you automatically. You just hook the drive up to the tool and it does the rest. I don't remember the times though, but I know it was faster than 2 hours.. eGo

yeah usually the manufacturers disk will take a very short amount of time. And I believe it is a software limitation. Because simply it takes far less for a full format in windows.