Installing 2TB disk for data (1 Viewer)

[Peter2]

Hi guys,

I'm planning to move my data from an old pc that I installed linux on to a second drive in my HTPC.
For this, I bought a Samsung F4 2TB drive and an external enclosure that will hold the old data drive for backup.
To format the drive I have put it in the enclosure and connected it through USB to my desktop and it is formatting now.
I have searched for information on this but cannot find a clear answer so I give a try here.

The drive is formatting (full format) with 4k sectors and until now, it has only done 18% in about 3 hours time.
My HTPC is currently configured in dual boot xp/w7 because I'm evaluating the difference/advantage of switching to w7.
1) is it normal that this takes so long and would there be any difference if the drive was connected through (e)SATA for this?
2) what about accessing the data from within Xp?
3) does any of you have experience with writing to an NTFS drive on linux?

TIA!
P²

 

[ryan20021982]

Are you formatting from Linux or Windows? In Windows it can take some time if you don't check Perform a Quick Format.

I have 8 1.5tb's and 5 2tb's and have never had it take longer than 60 seconds using a quick format on Windows.

 

[Peter2]

Hi Ryan, I'm doing this on a w7 and it's a full format since it's a new drive.
I know that linux is much faster in formatting but the point is that it has to be NTFS and 4k sectors so don't know if this can be done on linux.

 

[robbo100]

I know it is probably a bit late to answer (since your format should be long complete by now).

The only difference that I know of, between a full format and a quick format is that the full format does a disc check to search for bad sectors on the disc.

The format doesn't take long, but the disc check can take a very long time, especially if there are lost of errors on the disc (which I hope is not the case for your new disc).

Robbo100

 

[mm1352000]

Hi there

I have also just recently bought 2 of the Samsung 2TB F4 drives. Don't trust Vista to format them correctly because it didn't work! I'm not sure if W7 would do the job, but it might pay to check before you get the drive full of data and find it performs poorly. I primarily use XP so I originally tried to download and use the Samsung align tool but it failed to recognise my drives! I ended up having to use gparted 7.1 to do the job...

The other thing you want to do is upgrade the firmware. Have a look here...

 

[Peter2]

Hi robbo100, it took about 20h to format the drive - guess that's the downside of having bigger disks.
I don't know if this would have gone faster if the drive was hooked to an onboard sata port.
It's just like mm1352000 says, and what I have always known and done: you better full format a new drive to make sure that there are no errors.
In the meantime, I have copied my data over by hooking the disk to my linux machine by using the ntfs-3g driver which works fine.

mm1352000: did you experience any issues since you updated the firmware?

 

[mm1352000]

mm1352000: did you experience any issues since you updated the firmware?

No, no problems with the firmware upgrade, although I'm not sure I would have noticed. I found out about it from here. Haven't seen any issues with the upgrade there either.