Formatting External SATA Hard Drive Takes Forever

Aug
17
2006
Photo: Lukas

I'm waiting for a 250GB hard drive to finish formatting. I neglected to check the "quick formatting" checkbox that I normally do and am experiencing just how long it takes to format this dang thing. It's going on an hour and 10 minutes and there's still 5% left.

The drive itself has been sitting here for something like 2 months, waiting to get put into an enclosure and hooked up to the HTPC. The former enclosure was defective and the new one showed up today. I slapped the drive into the box, hooked it all up and got right to the formatting bit within about 5 minutes. Now we wait.

Posted in General, Technology |

 

Comments on this post

Feedback is always welcome. Read some from other folks or leave your own below. Just keep things civil and remember that what you post lives on in public. Forever.

Thanks,
J

3 Responses to “Formatting External SATA Hard Drive Takes Forever”

  1. Jim Says:
    December 12th, 2006 at 9:34 am

    I have a question, if you care to answer–Did the format ever finish? I had installed a WD 250Gig SATA drive, and in Windows device manager, I partitioned it, then clicked format, and it never, ever showed any progress. After 2 full hours, no progress bar. It then locked up the machine. I rebooted, did a Quick format, took

  2. J Wynia Says:
    December 12th, 2006 at 1:40 pm

    Oh, yeah. It took a couple of hours, but it did end up finishing.

    I'm thinking of putting an external 500GB drive in an enclosure and attaching it to the same machine. I'll be sure to note exactly how long it takes to format it.

  3. Jim Says:
    December 13th, 2006 at 5:58 am

    Thanks J. My WD ended up being bad, it never even got to the 1% part of format, in windows or cmd prompt mode. A Quick format then resulted in partial success–the drive was recognized, files were able to be copied, but upon read they returned crc errors. I replaced it with a 250Gig Seagate sata 3Gb, and it began format immediatly, taking only about 75 min. to full-format the whole thing, and it performs perfectly. I've always preferred WD, but this is seagate's chance to win my trust.
    –Jim

Leave Your Own Comment

By submitting a comment, you agree to license it under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license.

People who post comments get the added benefit of visiting the site without advertising.

© 2003-2008 J Wynia. All original content is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license unless otherwise noted. Content from other sources is licensed under its original terms.