"Allocation Unit Size" and "Quick Format" options on 6TB Storage Drive

[Fun Guy]

I have just installed a new WD Black 6TB into my new system. Never thought about this issue when using "Format Partition" in "New Simple Volume Wizard" before, but then again, I never had anything over a 1TB drive.

I believe that 4KB (4096) is the size when "Default" is used for "Allocation unit size," and the "Perform a quick format" checkbox is selected by default by the wizard... is there any reason to deviate from these suggestions?

 

[TheELF]

is there any reason to deviate from these suggestions?

No,there is a tiny bit of performance to gain by using a higher Allocation unit size but you also loose a bit of storage space,on modern drives it's not worth it.
Also a full format will take hours maybe even more then a day to complete,6Tb is huge...

 

[Fun Guy]

No,there is a tiny bit of performance to gain by using a higher Allocation unit size but you also loose a bit of storage space,on modern drives it's not worth it.
Also a full format will take hours maybe even more then a day to complete,6Tb is huge...

So is a quick format is okay?

 

[Fun Guy]

So just did a quick format. Ended up with 5,589GB or 5.6TB or more than 400GB short of the advertised capacity. Hmm....

 

[Anteaus]

For large capacity hard drives, I usually recommend the first format be the slow, comprehensive one. That way any obvious problems will be found right at the beginning and not 6 months down the line when you finally get around to writing data to those sectors. I know it takes a long time, but best case you gain peace of mind...at worst you find some bad sectors and exchange the drive.

 

[Wall Street]

So just did a quick format. Ended up with 5,589GB or 5.6TB or more than 400GB short of the advertised capacity. Hmm....

This is due to the binary vs decimal conversion. Hard drive manufacturers advertise decimal capacities, where 6 TB is 6 bytes x 1,000,000,000,000. Windows measures binary (power of two) units, where 6 TB is 6 bytes x 1024 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024. Since 1024 is close to but not exactly 1000, there is a discrepancy.

 

[Captain_WD]

~snip~

Hey there Fun Guy,

For the allocation unit size I'd leave it on the default setting. It can have a small effect on some specific type of usage, but generally it has little to no effect.
The quick format simply erases the partition table, but leaves the data on the drive. This enables the drive to simply overwrite the existing data with the new one. A full format will wipe the drive clean of all data, but it will take quite a long time, as the guys pointed out.

I'd check this article as it explains perfectly fine why drives appear smaller than described in the label: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte

Feel free to ask if you happen to have any questions

Captain_WD.

 

[mindless1]

This is not highly technical. What has happened to this forum that we're leaving topics like this here?