Quick format vs not quick format 4TB HDD W7/P64 T61

[cadillacmike68]

Ok, so I'm trying to re-use the Seagate 4TB from the Seagate Central NAS which had the controller card on the NAS fail. Its a Seagate 4TB Desktop drive. Nice how Seagate sells a NAS and puts a desktop HDD in it. Buffalo does the same thing. jeez... Over 38,000 power on time on the drive, but I think most of that was spun down time, because it does spin down. The Seagate Central never provided any utilities to look at the disk, etc. and even Crystal Disk Info can't see a NAS drive.

Cristal Dick Info shows some caution indicators, and it's some linux format so I had to re-format to use in an external USB enclosure. CDI has yellow on Reallocated Sectors, Pending Sectors and Un-correctable Sectors. I figured a "not quick" format will write the entire disk. It's formatting with win disk management, a simple single volume GPT.

But its taking forever! More than 12 hours later and it's only at 24% done. It'll take more than 2 days at this rate?

A: is doing the "not quick" format really any better than the quick format in this circumstance.

B: will a hard format like this ferret out and clear the un-correctable sectors, etc, or is there a limit on the drive's capacity to mark off such sectors?

[dr_st]

CDI has yellow on Reallocated Sectors, Pending Sectors and Un-correctable Sectors.

This does not predict a long life for the drive, unfortunately.

A: is doing the "not quick" format really any better than the quick format in this circumstance.

Normally there is little reason to do non-quick format unless you want to decrease (but not to zero) the chance of someone recovering data from the drive. In your case, I would leave it at the full format. You will have a better assessment of the drive's condition after that.

B: will a hard format like this ferret out and clear the un-correctable sectors, etc, or is there a limit on the drive's capacity to mark off such sectors?

There is a limit, of course, but the more important thing is that their presence (especially if the number is growing) indicates impending failure.

[cadillacmike68]

Thank you.

I will save a CDI report on the drive when it's finished formatting (on Sunday!) and will check it again after I put some data on it. I could not run Hitachi's DFT on it earlier because it was not an NTFS formatted drive (and DFT might refuse to run, but I have Seagate tools as well.). But I'll run that too after it's finished. I'm not going to use it for mission critical data, just a backup of music, photos and an Extra copy of system backup images.

[cadillacmike68]

OK, It got stuck for hours at 50% so I shut it off and transferred the whole thing to my T530 with a USB 3 port. I'm doing a quick format now, but it is not giving a percentage after 30 min. This drive might be ready for the hanging platter display too...

The quick format failed right after my post. It hand up winblows explorer and disk management every time I try to start. This drive seems to be toast.