Hi.

With a brand-new 500GB drive, consisting of one 425GB partition, a 40GB partition, and a 2.4GB system partition, is there any serious danger in using quick-format?

Long-formatting the 2.4GB and 40GB partitions does not take that long, but long-formatting a 425GB partition would take hours, so I chose to simply tick the "Quick format" box when creating the new partition under Disk Management.

I suppose technically, there could be a bad area/sector even on a brand new drive, and the only way to be 100% sure the drive is fine, is to long-format it, however, I was of the opinion that a new drive is probably more likely to be perfectly fine, over an older drive which might have had a rough life and more likely to have bad sectors...

I have another 3 of these 500GB drives to setup yet, so long-formatting such huge partitions would take the rest of the week!!!
:D

What is the general consensus with quick-formatting vs long-formatting when you are talking 250+GB partitions?

Thanks.

I "never" long format - I just don't see the point. As you obviously have realised the main difference with long formatting is to fully check for surface defects. This can be done later-on any time by running chkdsk X: /R and then rebooting and leaving the PC to do the checking overnight or by doing the equivalent with the maker's diagnostics or a windows utility such as HDTune (http://www.hdtune.com/). If you have a suspect drive then it should be surface-checked regardless.

EDIT
I suppose technically, there could be a bad area/sector even on a brand new driveTrue (in fact there always are some) - but most such areas will have been excluded at the factory level on such modern drives and are dynamically reallocated under S.M.A.R.T. Technology. The Reallocated Sectors Count (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.) gives an indication of the state of play and only when these run out of reallocation space will "bad sectors" be detectable as "surface defects".

Excellent.
:)
Thanks for that, Paul.
Puts my mind more at ease.

I used to long-format ALL drives up to a few years ago - even the NEW ones - but with today's sizes - even 160GB takes a long time to long-format.

I suppose that's why they call it a "Long-format"!!!!

Well, one of the reasons, anyway...