Formatting a 1TB drive takes 4hrs?!

[JEDI]

from this thread:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2241236

i'm now seeing the drive as 1TB instead of 429 gigs.

i'm formatting it as ntfs under Win7.
and its taking FOREVER!

Google says 4hrs to format a 1TB drive. (dont trust quick format for a new drive out of the box.) i have a AMD 960T quad-core 3ghz system.

Why does it take that long???

 

[Slugbait]

Why does it take that long???

Read/Write tests, I believe, in order to segregate bad sectors among other things. I think it also results in getting performance sooner...for example, installing an app to a quick-formatted drive would take longer than a fully formatted drive.

 

[mfenn]

You're reading every single sector on the drive. 1TB is 1,000,000 MB and you can read at an average of ~90 MB/s across the whole drive. The math works out to 3.08 hours to read the entire drive. If you don't like the limitations of physics, you should just do a quick format like the rest of the world.