Question Win10 Disk management, drive disappears and format continues?

[mikeford]

I'm formatting and testing 6x new old 4TB drives, one drive on the motherboard sata connection and one using a USB 3.0 sata cable. I was running WD tools on the MB drive, and disk management on the USB to format that drive, and all seemed dandy, then I tried to upload the .png of the Crystal disk info results, not recalling where CDI puts those I did my lazy usual and tried a search of "my pc" for the saved image in the upload dialog box and things kind of froze related to the dialog box and I closed it. About this time the drive that was being formatted by disk management, poofed from that window and it refreshed. USB/Sata adapter is showing traffic as expected during a format and I can feel stuff going on with the drive, but nothing sees it. Format on 4TB takes 8 hours, is this normal or should I stop and restart it, which would also allow me to swap in the next drive on the MB connection?

 

[Muadib]

You should stop it. Format takes minutes, not hours. The only time I've seen it take hours is with a bad drive.

 

[VirtualLarry]

You should stop it. Format takes minutes, not hours. The only time I've seen it take hours is with a bad drive.

Sorry, BZZT. You've obviously never changed the default from "Quick Format", to "Full Format", which is what you want to do with a used drive to test it (writes Zeros to every sector), and yes, it does take hours. That's NOT a malfunction.

 

[Muadib]

Sorry, BZZT. You've obviously never changed the default from "Quick Format", to "Full Format", which is what you want to do with a used drive to test it (writes Zeros to every sector), and yes, it does take hours. That's NOT a malfunction.

Actually I recently did it on my own 4tb drives that I temporarily had in my NAS. Now I have to try it again when I get back there. It’s possible that it didn’t change to full. I was under the influence of some bourbon at the time, so yeah there’s that...

 

[VirtualLarry]

Actually I recently did it on my own 4tb drives that I temporarily had in my NAS. Now I have to try it again when I get back there. It’s possible that it didn’t change to full. I was under the influence of some bourbon at the time, so yeah there’s that...

LOL. Sorry for being so harsh initially. Yeah, it probably was the Bourbon.

For future reference, Disk Management allows you to "Quick Format" or "Full Format" a Volume, and a Quick Format just lays down the filesystem, it doesn't wipe the partition, whereas a Full Format will do a full wipe of the Volume before writing the Filesystem information.

Edit: That's not to say that you were that wrong though, if a drive is bad or malfunctioning, it can and usually does take nearly forever to format...

 

[mikeford]

Does full format just write zeros? I was guessing it would do something like four passes, write zeros, read, write ones, read, etc.

Still nothing showing in disk management, and blue light on USB/Sata still flashing merrily.

 

[mikeford]

Also could be the USB/Sata is MUCH slower, claim is 5Gbps, but its still blinking away about 15 hrs later. I am reluctant to stop it, but around 24hrs it would be too slow for this use since the internal connection requires a shut down to swap drives and does a format in 8 hrs, which is 3 drives in 24. If it stops on its own, or I stop it, first task will be a speed test.

 

[mikeford]

Looks like my USB/Sata cable has issues, works fine a for a few minutes, but failed each time I tried anything that took more than 5 minutes, long format or WD Tools extended test, either just disconnecting and bringing up the what do you want to do with this new device dialog or generating errors.

This one is going back to Amazon asap, and I will be ordering replacements, too handy not to have if it worked.