Invisible wrote:
> 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.

All NTFS has to write is about 5 blocks of file data and the free space 
bitmap (which isn't stored as a bitmap anyway). I'd be surprised if it 
writes more than a hundred K regardless of the size of the disk. NTFS 
doesn't preallocate i-nodes, nor are the i-nodes spread all over the 
disk, so it's generally way, way faster. In other words, an NTFS format 
formats two or three superblocks, one boot record, two copies of the 
first sixteen "i-nodes", and writes out an empty root directory, an 
almost-empty free space map, and an almost-empty ACL table. I wouldn't 
be surprised if FAT32 on a big drive took more writing than NTFS to format.

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.

(The difference between ext3 and ext2 is a few seconds of creating the 
journal, so that's not the problem.)

> 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.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
  Helpful housekeeping hints:
   Check your feather pillows for holes
    before putting them in the washing machine.

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