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How do you use a HDD for the first time?

DesiPower

DesiPower

Lifer
I mean when you buy a new HDD what do you do before you use it? Format? quick format? no format? what do you recommend?
 
I clone it from the drive it will replace. That takes care of everything.
 
DesiPower said:
that's not a solution.. what if you are buying a 2TB HDD for the 1st time..
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That makes no difference. Cloning would then be proportional and take care of the whole enchilada. It truly is a solution.
 
corkyg said:
I clone it from the drive it will replace. That takes care of everything.
Click to expand...

Wrong. Cloning a drive does not check for bad sectors on the new drive. It is a pain in the ass but, a full format is the best course of action. Even if you use sector by sector cloning method it will not check the new drives sectors if nothing was written to those on the first drive.
 
Even if you are a moderator, it's sad to see free help get disrespected and abused. 🙁 It almost makes you not want to help, at least for free.
 
Sorry, I did not intend to come off as disrespectful. I just disagree with the statement "That takes care of everything".
 
Yeah, NTFS "full format" as a minimum. On Win7 (and Vista?), it doesn't just scan the disk, but I heard it actually writes zeros first. On XP it just does a surface scan (read verify), then writes out the filesystem.
 
Doesn't it boil down to, how much you trust the HD ?
Doing a full format instead of a clone or a quick format will check/use 100% of the space.
This makes the HD work harder, and usually, will find more issues (bad blocks) than just a clone or a quick format would.

Yeah, it takes forever as the sizes keep going up, but there is no way around it.

Some people even do HD 'tourture tests', on the theory that if the HD was to fail, it will do so in the first X days of being tortured, and that most failures happen on a bell curve.
 
As I recall, Op's question was, "How do YOU use a HDD . . .?" 🙂

My response was how I do it - how anyone else does it is their business. I have not done a full format and sector check for almost 10 years - clone and go works for me. No HDD problems either.

My statement, "That takes care of everything" applies only to me in the context of Op's question. No offense taken. 🙂
 
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Usually a quick format unless it's my system drive and then maybe a full format. I've had excellent luck with hard drives over the years and I've had a lot of them.
 
ElFenix said:
just like with headphone jacks
Click to expand...

With headphones I like to dip the connector in honey before I use it for the first time, it makes the sound sweeter. And you definitely have to grease the SATA connectors, everyone knows this.

Honestly OP, brand new hard drive? If it is for a Mac, I change it to GPT and clone it. For Windows, I drop it in and format it. I have never had much luck with Windows cloning.
 
using XP created new 1 gb partition (primary). Then through explorer did full format. everything worked out well... both drives lookin good
 
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