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Blank (virgin) HDD's; are any preformatted?

V

videobruce

Gawd
Joined
Jan 21, 2005
Messages
515
I have always been under the impression new hard drives (not SSD's) are not formatted. Low level, yes, but not for ant file system (FAT32, NTFS, ext2, ext3 etc.) It was up to the user to prepare the drive.

I got into a discussion with an "engineer" from a small CE manufacture regarding DVR's and he is/was under the impression new drives were already formatted. I explained how could be since there isn't any way the manufacture would/could know how/where the drive was going to be used.

I did a little searching and came across this article;
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-format-a-new-internal-hard-drive/

and this statement;
Most new external hard drives available in the market are designed to be plug and play. By plug and play, what I mean is that you can just plug in the hard drive and start using it right away. This is because the manufacturers send the disk initialised and ready to work with the most common operating systems.
The internal hard disks available in the market, on the other hand, require to be prepared before use.
Click to expand...
"External" hard drives?? The only t
"external" thing I know is an external enclosure.

Am I missing something here?? Has something changed in the past five or so years??
 
External hard drives are always formatted.

Internal drives are never formatted.

Or at least that is what I have seen with the 100s of drives I have purchased for work over the last 15 years.
 
All external drives I have, WD passport and the like, have been plug n play with my Windows boxes. Not so much on the Linux stuff. Usually in a Fat32. I don't recall if any were in NTFS. It's been awhile since the purchase of a prepackaged external drive. Usually I get a bare drive and a separate enclosure for a DIY external rig.
Every internal drive I have ever bought, starting with a 40 meg Seagate drive way back when, has been run thru Fdisk, or newer variation as the OS's have improved over the years.
 
External, yes it's at least going to come formatted to FAT32, although the bigger ones tend to be NTFS now. Rarely you see MAC formatted ones, or at least drives with software that will format it for the customer for HFS+ It's just because it's expected that external drive users may not be familiar with formatting or drive initialization, or specifically buy it for backup purposes so it pays to be convenient.
 
Yes external, like the ones that you buy pre-packaged from WD, Seagate...etc. This is not common sense?



videobruce said:
I have always been under the impression new hard drives (not SSD's) are not formatted. Low level, yes, but not for ant file system (FAT32, NTFS, ext2, ext3 etc.) It was up to the user to prepare the drive.

I got into a discussion with an "engineer" from a small CE manufacture regarding DVR's and he is/was under the impression new drives were already formatted. I explained how could be since there isn't any way the manufacture would/could know how/where the drive was going to be used.

I did a little searching and came across this article;
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-format-a-new-internal-hard-drive/

and this statement;"External" hard drives?? The only t
"external" thing I know is an external enclosure.

Am I missing something here?? Has something changed in the past five or so years??
Click to expand...
 
External hard drives are always formatted.
Internal drives are never formatted.
Click to expand...
This is the problem. Wording.
Exactly what is the difference between an external hard drive and internal??
Nothing, it's the same type of drive. The terminology is wrong and misleading.

What should be stated is "an external enclosure with a pre-installed hard drive". Huge difference.

Not picking on you, but this is about as bad as the CEA calling LED driven (lighted) LCD TV's "LED TV"s".

Isn't there enough confusion out there as it is??
 
Yes external, like the ones that you buy pre-packaged from WD, Seagate...etc. This is not common sense?
Click to expand...
Take that hard drive out of that pre-packaged combo and place it in a PC and it becomes a internal hard dive doesn't it?

It's the wording. One has to assume what one is talking about. Right??
 
Well it might just be confusion over semantics. There's 3 types of formatting -

1. low level
2. initialization (create partition table etc)
3. high level (format partitions)

Most internal drives AFAIK are low level formatted and SOME are initialized but none are high level formatted. Name brand drives that come inside an enclosure are almost always high level formatted because they usually contain additional software stored on the disk itself.
 
Guys, please keep the conversation on topic and leave the personal insults out of it. I don't care if you've been here seven years or seven minutes, the rules apply to everyone.

You guys can debate, even argue the facts all you want. But, when it turns personal, mods or admins have to step in and you may not be thrilled with how that goes.
 
Xeth; the confusion is from whomever started to refer to drives placed inside external enclosures as "external drives".
Good descriptive post BTW.
 
There isn't a difference really but yes "external" as the market calls it are pre-formatted.
 
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