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>> 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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