NTFS Quick Format?

[mongo]

My thing about a full format and a quick format was...

If you are using a drive for the very FIRST time, I would do a full format just to be safe to be sure there isn't any errors down the drive. After you do it once, quick formats are fine after that.

On an IDE drive any bad blocks are automatically re-mapped. You'll never see any errors unless the number of bad blocks is more than the number of blocks reserved for re-mapping, in which case you have a very bad drive.

[mongo]

correct - the only difference between full and fast is that a full one nulls out all blocks, while the fast only sets up a new/empty dir structure.

Tom UK

Full just reads the blocks and checks for errors, it doesn't write to them.