Harddrives

[melott]

Hello ......
My Quantum 1.4 gig drive died after about 10 years.
I picked up a Quantum 4.3 gig drive for a good price.
Can anyone tell me roughly how long it takes to
low-level format a 4.3 gig scsi drive??
I have an A3000, w/origonal amiga scsi adaptor
and OS 3.1.  I let HD tools 'say' it was formating
for over 4 hours but I don't hear any clicking in the
drive. I don't think it formating.
Its been a long time since I formated a drive.
Anyone have any ideas??

Mel Ott

[lorddef]

low-level formatting usually takes a couple of seconds as I remember.  :-(

[Vincent]

My 2.4 gig IDE took less than 2 seconds.  I't really fast.  If it's not done in 10 seconds it's not doing it right.

[Piru]

There is no low level format on IDE/ATA drives.

What those PC "Low Level Format" tools do, is to write the whole disk full of 0 or 1, starting from the first physical block and ending at the last physical block (on amiga terms, this will overwrite RDB, all partitioning information, all partitions and user data).

HDToolBox "Low Level Format" does not do this. It send a special SCSI command to the device, and this is always ignored or reported as an error by IDE/ATA drives.

IDE/ATA drives can be reinitialized though, as described above. If this "so called" low level formatting (which really is not low level formatting at all) is performed, it will take VERY long time. How long? Depends on the size of the HD and the speed of the IDE bus. To get rough idea, divide the total size of the HD (MB) with the speed of the interface (MB/sec), result is seconds. Depending on the tool (if it does verify), the time could double. Also allow some percentage of overhead.

[melott]

Yes.. remember this is a SCSI drive......

I seem to remember something about a 4 gig limit.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Can I format the 4.3 gig as one drive or do I have
to partition it??

Mel Ott :-?  :-?

[N7VQM]

There's no need to low-level format your drive.  Simple partition and format each partition with your perfered filesystem.  There are even SCSI drives now that ignore a low-level format command.

I wish I had been told not to low-level format before I destroyed a 4.3GB Seagate SCSI-3 drive.  :-(

[Brian]

If you're going to use good old FFS on the drive then you need to have partisions no larger than 2Gb and a total of no more then 4Gb... So you need to partision that drive into at least two 2Gb partisions and then live with the loss off about 150Mb.

If you got DOpus you can quickly find out if you've made the size too big since it will present you with a negative size for the drive then.

[Quixote]

;-) Let's not forget the difference between binary and decimal Gigabytes.  Four binary gigs is equal to 4,398,046,511,104 bytes, or about 4.3 decimal gigs.  Usually, the package gives you the decimal version, because marketers want to show the customer the version that looks bigger.

[LP]

well you can quick format it after you've partioned it... You don't need to format from top (slow).

Hmm... You can't have more than 2Gb partions under FFS? I have a 30Gb splitted in 10 partions... Wich means I've got 3Gb on each... :-?
I've had it for a year now... Haven't been a error, it hasn't even validated once...

[Sloxa]

Hmmm... .  my  32gb ide takes over 2hours to format...  is there  something  wrong??
my rom  is 3.1 and im using os3.9.
i have eide99!!  and i use it only 1 partition.
 :-)

[Jope]

Vincent wrote:
My 2.4 gig IDE took less than 2 seconds.  I't really fast.  If it's not done in 10 seconds it's not doing it right.

Are you talking about lowlevel formatting?

A real LLF takes several hours, but IDE drives just ignore the command, that's why it takes "less than 2 seconds" - the drive doesn't do it at all.

Most SCSI drives don't do it either any more.

Rule of thumb: don't lowlevelformat your disks, if they accept the command and something goes wrong, you might lose the disk.

[sTix]

But you really shouldn't use FFS, try SFS (aminet)
or PFS (commercial) instead, they are faster, more
reliable and less limited (partionsizes, flienames a.s.o..)

[Vincent]

HDToolBox "Low Level Format" does not do this. It send a special SCSI command to the device, and this is always ignored or reported as an error by IDE/ATA drives.

Not really, it depends on the IDE drive.  When I LLF'd my partitions years ago, they did not return an error.  Okay, it was done in less than two seconds which meant it really wasn't don, but they appeared as normal drives on WB.

After I've partitioned my drives I LLF them, so that I know they have been named properly (rarely HDToolbox gave me a partition that I couldn't format properly - this was after NOT LLF'ing the drive.  I redid the partitions in HDToolbox and LLF'd the drive, everything was fine after that).

I don't LLF my drives anymore, I have only got one FFS partition - my boot one - the rest are all SFS.

I only LLF my partitions as a cautionary measure (as explained above), then I format each partition properly after the reboot.

[Piru]

Not really, it depends on the IDE drive. When I LLF'd my partitions years ago

You can't low level format partitions. The low level format erases the whole disk. If it works, you will lose ALL partitions and the drive will appear uninitialized in HDToolBox.

After I've partitioned my drives I LLF them, so that I know they have been named properly (rarely HDToolbox gave me a partition that I couldn't format properly - this was after NOT LLF'ing the drive.

Again, you cannot low level format partitions.

I redid the partitions in HDToolbox and LLF'd the drive, everything was fine after that).

Again, if the low level format succeeds, you lose all partitions, so you didn't really LLF.

I don't LLF my drives anymore

...and you never did.


Perhaps you are mixing up normal format and LLF here?

[Piru]

Not really, it depends on the IDE drive.

The early IDE drives indeed did accept this command, and the HD only ended up unusable. That is why it was disabled later.