Question

Looong Format Time for WD EXT 2 TB Drive

Asked by: ermooney

Hi,
I recently bought a WD My Book Studio Edition II two terabyte external drive.  It has firewire, eSATA and USB ports.  I attached it to my Vista 64 machine via USB and wasn't able to bring the drive up in Total Commander, so I looked in the Computer Management / Drive Management section of Control Panel and found the drive but it wasn't initialized.  I initialized it as a GPT drive and started an NTFS format of the drive but 24 hours later the dive is only 86% formatted.  Is this a danger sign?  Years ago, when I had trouble formatting a Seagate SCSI drive, it formatted eventually but went bad within about 6 months.  I bought this drive at a discount because it had been returned to the store once but if it is a defective drive, it isn't worth even a discounted price.  Could I get some feedback about this lengthy format situation?

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Asked On
2009-09-23 at 04:04:10ID24754462
Tags

Western External Drive; HD Formatting

Topic

Computer Hard Drives

Participating Experts
1
Points
500
Comments
4

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Answers

 

by: leewPosted on 2009-09-23 at 04:31:02ID: 25401874

You did a "full format" instead of a quick format, didn't you?  A Full Format merely runs a check on the sectors in the same way chkdsk does... on a new drive, there's little point in running a full format.  And you connected it via USB (which is slower on many levels than eSATA and even slower than Firewire (sustained, firewire is faster, burst, USB COULD be faster; the SPECs claim USB is faster, but it just isn't in real world tests)).  24 hours to get to 86% does seem a bit slower than I'd expect... but since you're connected via USB... I wouldn't worry about it.  If you connected via eSATA and it took that long, THEN I'd worry.

 

by: ermooneyPosted on 2009-09-23 at 04:52:49ID: 25402038

Thanks for the comment.  I'm now at 89% of the full format and would like to see how the drive looks when the format is done before I accept the solution and close the question.  BTW, I'm going to dig out one of those external eSATA posts from my parts heap and hook the drive up as an SATA drive later.  Don't know why I didn't think of that to begin with but I had no idea that the USB format would take so long.  I'm glad to learn the difference between a full format and a quick format.  I thought in some way the full format was better and less flaky than the quick format.

 

by: ermooneyPosted on 2009-09-23 at 09:55:17ID: 25405301

Thanks leew.  The drive looks to be in good shape and the copy time via USB is not bad.  I've now copied a fair amount of data and can't detect any problems with the drive.

 

by: leewPosted on 2009-09-23 at 12:00:47ID: 25406640

Just FYI

This applies to more than XP:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302686

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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