>> holding file data will still be intact. (Formatting with, say, ext2 
>> takes a tiny fraction of the time that FAT or NTFS formatting takes,
> 
> D'oh?  Hardly.   I've never had an NTFS format take more than a half a 
> minute or so, and formatting a 750G drive with ext3 on the same machine 
> takes 10 or 15 minutes.

For me, it typically takes about 20 minutes to do a full NTFS format on 
a large partition. (Doesn't seem to matter how big the drive is - 
presumably because larger drives are also newer and hence faster.)

> Ext2/3 stores i-nodes all over the disk, preformatting them. This takes 
> time when you have a couple gig of i-nodes to fill out.

For me, ext2 takes about 15 seconds or so - very much faster. Comparable 
to an NTFS "quick format".

>> I am unsure as to whether #4 and #5 are different in any way. Both 
>> seem to take the same amount of time...
> 
> On my drives, at least one of the maxtor "format back to factory-fresh" 
> only wrote the first sector on each track or something. It finished way 
> too fast to be writing the whole drive. Unless the drive had a command 
> built in that wiped the entire track in one rotation or something, 
> rather than actually having to transfer the data from memory to the 
> drive for the whole thing.

On the Maxtor tool I have, there are two options: "low-level format 
(quick)" and "low-level format (full)". The former erases the beginning 
and end of the drive. The latter erases everything. (And takes a 
ridiculous amount of time to complete.)

Clearly I'm going to have to actually do some experiments. :-P

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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