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I have a new 3 TB hard drive that I would like to peform a full format on in Windows. Its my understanding that a full format will mark any bad sectors on the drive and will not use those sectors to store data.

However, this drive will not be used in Windows - it will be used as a backup drive for a Mac. If I quick format the drive again through the Mac OS, will the bad sectors that Windows possibly found during the full format still be "marked" as bad to the Mac OS? Or do I need to perform the full format of the drive on Mac for this benefit?

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 Its my understanding that a full format will mark any bad sectors on the drive 
 and will not use those sectors to store data.

That used to be true for old drives. A full format or a full scandisk on windows used to find broken sectors and mark them as bad.

However it is no longer needed. *1 Modern drives (and if you have 3TB drive then it is quite modern) auto detect broken sectors and remap these on their own. Unless the drive has quite a few of these and runs out ot spare sectors to remap to, you will not even notice this happening. And since the drive does it on its own there is no difference if you do this on windows, OS/X, or any other OS.



*1: Unless you run out of spare sectors, in which case the drive is probably dying. Or old and dying. This will not be the case with a new drive, but I added it just for completeness sake.

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Just full format on your Mac to save yourself the headache. The way you have it you're doubling your work.

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