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I bought a 500 GB passport drive yesterday. I noticed it was FAT, so I thought I'd change it to be NTFS.

Format as NTFS, and use, right?

Wrong.

It has been formating since 10 AM. It is now 4:25 PM and it still has not finished.

I am using Windows Vista Business 64 SP1.

Why does it take that long?

How do I speed it up?

2 Answers 2

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Use Quick Format, or you'll be sitting there all day :)

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  • There's an option when you format using NTFS to do a "quick" format. it marks everything as free in the allocation table, but doesn't overwrite all the data on the drive. The normal format goes thru, i believe, and overwrites every bit with 0 (or 1.. i'm not sure). Essentially, writing to the entire drive.
    – Roy Rico
    Sep 22, 2009 at 20:34
  • oh now this post has a screenshot.
    – Roy Rico
    Sep 22, 2009 at 20:35
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    well, formatting a huge USB drive takes forever and a day. if you want to destroy previous data, use DBAn and nuke the partition. however, using disk management to delete the old partition, creating a new one and using quick format will suffice and is MUCH quicker.
    – Molly7244
    Sep 22, 2009 at 20:37
  • can you quickformat to a different filesystem? I was under the impression that wasn't possible.
    – Phoshi
    Sep 22, 2009 at 20:47
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    yes, you can. even without deleting the partition.
    – Molly7244
    Sep 22, 2009 at 20:51
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If you use an external casing with SATA to USB converter, the culprit is the converter. I had similar issues, where the HDD was SATA2 with 3GB/s transfer rate whereas the SATA controller on the converter was SATA1 with 1.5GB/s transfer rate. So I had to downgrade the HDD but plugging in a jumper as mentioned in the hard-drive and now it works like a breeze

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