new HDD formatting question

[johnno]

Hello,

I have a Hitachi 1TB Deskstar 7K1000.D 3.5" 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 32MB on its way. It is going to be a game and storage drive. Windows is on a 60GB SSD.

What is the best way to prepare the drive before I copy all my stuff on to it? I was going to plug it in and use windows Disk Management to set up two or three partitions and then Quick Format them. Would there be any need to do a full format?

Cheers

 

[DirkGently1]

No need to format at all. Set up the partitions, (if you insist on doing the unnecessary), and let Windows take care of the rest.

 

[Coup27]

When you first boot with the new disk in Windows it will ask you to initalise it. Once you have, it will either appear as a single NTFS partition, or as unallocated space in disk management.

From here, you can delete the NTFS partition (if it is there), and then make your own partitions in disk management. Windows 7 only does a quick format now and there would be no need to do anything else.

Some people insist on doing a full format with a new disk to "stress test" it but thats up to you. Not something I do. If you really wanted to, you could always run the disk through SeaTools before going into Windows.