25 Mar
2005
25 Mar
'05
12:45 p.m.
Why would you format a drive, in the sense of writing
all the blocks?
To change fundamental aspects such as sector size; to get the bad block
detection and remapping that accompanies it - to name just two.
There is no longer any such thing as a "low level
format".
What do you think a FORMAT UNIT command does, then? On the handful of
occasions I've had call to use it, it's certainly acted as though it's
doing what it's supposed to.
So unless you're desperate to get rid of the
manufacturing test
pattern, you might as well do a 30 second "quick format" to
initialize the file system.
Which of course is not formatting at all, and should not be called
formatting; it is more honestly called making a filesystem. (This is
one of the botches I lay at the door of MS-DOS and its relatives: they
rolled formatting and filesystem construction into the same program in
the beginning, with floppies, and then when moving to fixed disks, they
kept the same name but dropped the actual formatting functionality. As
a result, we now have a whole population that confuses formatting with
making filesystems.)
But the original poster's basic point stands: it takes roughly the same
amount of time to format a "big disk" now as it took to format a "big
disk" then, or to make a filesystem on a "big disk" now as it took to
make a filesystem on a "big disk" then.
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