The downside of large hard drives

[djheater]

Originally posted by: Viperoni


Coulda used it yesterday while formatting a 6gig Quantum Bigfoot..

I built a miniature city on my windowsill(sp?) using bigfoots some old laptop parts and those animals and little squeezetoys you always get at trade shows...

My daughter comes by weekly and godzillas it....

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: Killbat
Did you know that it takes approximately 2.74 fortnights to format a 160GB drive? Well it does, and it's making me bored.
*dum dee dum dumm dumm*
*whistles*
Hrm...
So... how are all of you? Good I hope?

Try dropping 6 of them onto a Promise Supertrak controller and THEN formatting them... That took quiet some time...

Bill

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: Viper GTS
Did you know Windows XP can do a quick format on a bare, never been partitioned HD?
Kinda cool.

Viper GTS

The quick format doesn't check the drive for write/read errors, it just lays out the disk structure. I don't usually trust that on 'new' drives, while it takes awhile there is some comfort in knowing the drive is 'ok' before you start filling it up

Bill

 

[cherrytwist]

Yo, luvz the webbasite

<- Fellow St. Louisan

 

[Legendary]

Originally posted by: Viper GTS
Did you know Windows XP can do a quick format on a bare, never been partitioned HD?

Kinda cool.



Viper GTS

So does 2000.

 

[aphex]

Originally posted by: Legendary

Originally posted by: Viper GTS
Did you know Windows XP can do a quick format on a bare, never been partitioned HD?

Kinda cool.



Viper GTS

So does 2000.

I used XP to do a quick format on a bare 120gb yesterday. Took all of 20, maybe 30 seconds

 

[Fritzo]

Originally posted by: ElFenix
i formatted and 80 gig the other day and i swear it took like 2 hours. normally i wouldn't care because i format in win2k usually, which runs in the background while i nef, but this was a new system install. still, can't beat 80 gigs for $90. anyone remember when $0.10 a MB was a great price?

Isn't it funny how they've sped everything up to blinding speeds, but we still have to use 20 year old format.com to format our hard drives. You'd figure they'd have a better way by now.

 

[dawks]

XP and as far as I know, dont do 'scandisk' after the system crashes. Not important, just a side note, After WindowsME, scandisk no longer exists. Its CHKDISK from 2000 and on.

Wait.. Does 2k/XP do CHKDISK after a crash with Fat, or Fat32?

NTFS is setup in such a way that CHKDISK isnt needed after a system crash.

I love NTFS!! The far superior File System!

 

[dman]

Quick formatting is suck, agreed. I also like the comfort an unconditional format provides so that you know from the start if there are any really bad sectors.

If you bought a retail drive it came w/ a diskette for partitioning and formatting and installing a bios loader. You can usually do the format and partitioning w/o the bios piece. If you have an OEM you can dl the utility from the drive manuf. website.

 

[Frosty3799]

Originally posted by: djheater

Originally posted by: Frosty3799
im doing good, thanks.


why dont you spilt it into partitions, then format like a ~10 gig partition for windows, and then you can be up and running on that, and then overnight you can format the other ~150 gigs for data/backup/etc.

whoa.... you're like....smart and stuff.....

mmm cooooookies

 

[AndyHui]

Does 2k/XP do CHKDISK after a crash with Fat, or Fat32

Yes, it does.

 

[Freejack2]

What sucks is Windows XP crashing on a raid array. The scandisk is wicked quick but the array rebuild takes forever.
Fortunately I can use the computer while the array rebuilds.
Also nice is the little 3ware html information page that tells me how far along the rebuild is.
I can also set priorities of rebuild speed or i/o speed. All in all not a bad raid controller.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: DaZ
XP and as far as I know, dont do 'scandisk' after the system crashes. Not important, just a side note, After WindowsME, scandisk no longer exists. Its CHKDISK from 2000 and on.
Wait.. Does 2k/XP do CHKDISK after a crash with Fat, or Fat32?
NTFS is setup in such a way that CHKDISK isnt needed after a system crash.
I love NTFS!! The far superior File System!

Not exactly true. The file system *generally* can recover from a system crash, but it may require chkdsk to run. Doesn't happen very often, but it can happen. Also, remember the file system guarentees that it will recover itself (when possible!) after a system crash, but that doesn't apply to user data. That means the file system structure won't be screwed up, but the registry file you were writing when the cat tripped on the cord could be lost.

Isn't it funny how they've sped everything up to blinding speeds, but we still have to use 20 year old format.com to format our hard drives. You'd figure they'd have a better way by now.

The quick format is the 'better' way. But, you lose finding out about any bad parts of the drive (rare in new drives, but it DOES happen) until you try and access them later. The main problem is that drive size is outpacing drive speed. Since the system needs to read/write from the entire drive area when doing a 'normal' format, and drives have grown from 10g to 200g in the last 3-4 years, there is just ALOT more area to test. If it helps, think how painfull this would be if we where all still on ATA-33 drives

Bill

 

[compudog]

There was some REALLY useful information in this thread!
Killbat, kewl site! I like it.

Quite a few digressions, but still some useful info.

Now that I'm done my NEF...

 

[Killbat]

oooooohhh, sexy. My computer is infinitely quieter now that I pushed that 30GB bearing-grinding bastard out. Plus, now I have enough disk space to store GOD if he's properly compressed.

Wow, I can't believe the positive feedback on my total webbasite. It's just a slightly fancy navbar (CSS, I beg you to have my children) and some personal rambling crap. Or is it the STEW that captures your affection? It is, isn't it! Admit it, you love the stew!

 

[chiwawa626]

Well nextime u format just use format \s \q c:
\q is quick format (only works on a drive that has been previously formated after fdisk'd)

 

[Soybomb]

I came away from the website wanting to leave the hellhole that is siuc and go to your school.....and wanting to eat the stew.

tar -zxvf god-2.1-2.tar.gz

 

[KK]

Originally posted by: bsobel

Originally posted by: Killbat
Did you know that it takes approximately 2.74 fortnights to format a 160GB drive? Well it does, and it's making me bored.
*dum dee dum dumm dumm*
*whistles*
Hrm...
So... how are all of you? Good I hope?

Try dropping 6 of them onto a Promise Supertrak controller and THEN formatting them... That took quiet some time...

Bill

You did this? 160*6=960GB. I have 5 80GB on a supertrak, 1 of which is used for parity. It took some time to format, but I can't imagine 960GB.

KK

 

[FelixDeCat]

Originally posted by: ElFenix
i formatted and 80 gig the other day and i swear it took like 2 hours. normally i wouldn't care because i format in win2k usually, which runs in the background while i nef, but this was a new system install. still, can't beat 80 gigs for $90. anyone remember when $0.10 a MB was a great price?

80 gigs for $90 ? You got ripped. I paid about $25.

 

[IcemanJer]

Originally posted by: bsobel
The quick format doesn't check the drive for write/read errors, it just lays out the disk structure. I don't usually trust that on 'new' drives, while it takes awhile there is some comfort in knowing the drive is 'ok' before you start filling it up

I gotta agree with Bill here. Even though the yield is usually pretty good and I've never gotten a DOA drive, I still don't wanna push my luck.

 

[bsobel]

You did this? 160*6=960GB. I have 5 80GB on a supertrak, 1 of which is used for parity. It took some time to format, but I can't imagine 960GB.

Yea, but I didn't lay em out as JBOD's (which would have given the very cool 960gb ). I setup 4 as raid 5 (about 480gig), and two as a stripe set (320 gig). I backup the 'important' stuff from the 480gig raid to the 'backup' 320gig stripe. The extra unbackupable space is holding backups from my other machine, so everything (at least in theory) is duplicated at least twice.

This all started after one of the drives in the old array died (6*WD80's in RAID 5). The promise controller was nice enough to lock on every boot and not tell me which drive had failed. Unfortunately in debugging this the array died (that SHOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED WITH JUST ONE FAILED DRIVE!!!!!!! ERR, damm it!). Anyhow, after losing a bunch of stuff that I didn't have backups of (luckly I did of the important stuff on DVD-R), I decided 'this time' I'd pre-dedicate space to be used only for backup. I'm running 'SecondCopy' on the server now to do the 480->320 drive copying.

Bill