How long to format 8TB

[Priddle]

I am formatting a 8TB volume and I am estimating it's going to take 40 hours. I am at 45% now and started it roughly 18 hours ago. Is this normal? A 2TB volume has only taken 4-5 hours at most to format.

Thanks

 

[axan]

why are u running full format? just cancel and do quick format will take like 2 minutes.

 

[houkouonchi]

What file-system? What raid controller? What raid level?

We are going to need a lot more info to tell you if that format time is normal or not.

Formatting my 36TB file-system with JFS took about 10 seconds.

 

[Priddle]

Sorry, never had my coffee yet when I wrote that.

Win7 32bit, this controller:
http://www.datoptic.com/5x-drive-hardware-raid-controller.html

5 drives, 1 2TB and 4 1.5TB on a 'Large' volume.

It's a GPT partition, formatting in NTFS, 8k cluster size

I was going to do a quick format but figured might as well get the full format out of the way. With almost 50% done, I really don't want to cancel now lol

 

[k1pp3r]

Full NTFS format on that will take forever. Come back in a few days

 

[axan]

diff between full and quick format is that the full format checks for bad blocks so yes 8tb will take forever. You should have tested each hard drive individually before putting it in service that way you know the drives are good and can just do quick format.

 

[sub.mesa]

You are probably using RAID5, right? That kind of simple 'hardware' RAID (i prefer to call it embedded RAID) will be very bad for RAID5 write performance, and potentially dangerous too as it may lack certain logic needed to prevent corruption in some specific cases.

Creating two mirrors would be preferable, or just use software RAID instead and avoid RAID5.

 

[Priddle]

I'm in no rush anyway and a full format sounds like a good check.

Its not Raid5. The card is just combining all the drives as one volume. Before anyone calls me nuts, I do realize there is no redundancy so I will be backing up to externals.

 

[PigLover]

If you are running Raid5 and have a decent controller then the full format is a complete waste of time. Why bother scanning for bad blocks when your Raid will ALWAYS return good blocks at the OS level - with any bad ones dealt with at the hardware controller level? Besides - you already scanned it once for bad blocks when the RAID card did its initialize pass.

 

[nitrobass24]

Well considering that your controller is essentially just a glorified Port Multiplier, its going to take a long time. i would say 40hrs is about right.

 

[MaxBurn]

diff between full and quick format is that the full format checks for bad blocks so yes 8tb will take forever. You should have tested each hard drive individually before putting it in service that way you know the drives are good and can just do quick format.

+1, spinrite does a great job for this too.

 

[palmboy5]

diff between full and quick format is that the full format checks for bad blocks so yes 8tb will take forever. You should have tested each hard drive individually before putting it in service that way you know the drives are good and can just do quick format.

This has been a question on my mind for ages, do the bad sectors found by a full format LAST? Meaning does the system even remember that there were bad sectors once you do a quick format? I'm thinking that bad sector scan done by a full format only applies to that format.

 

[drescherjm]

This has been a question on my mind for ages, do the bad sectors found by a full format LAST?

I believe they did last at one point.

Most likely you never see hard errors during the format anyways because the hard drive will remap bad / weak sectors. If I get a single bad sector at the filesystem level I will send the drive back. However, I have not seen a bad sector (at the filesystem level) in at least10 years and that is at work with 200 to 400 hard drives formatted in the last 10 years.

With this said I normally test every single new drive using badblocks 4 pass test on linux before putting a drive into service. After the test I look for any errors in dmesg (system errors) and check the raw smart to see if any sectors were remapped. If a new drive has any reallocated sectors I send it back..