External drive formatting times...

[Access Denied]

I have been given 3 external drives and 1 NAS drive from work. I haven't looked at the NAS drive yet. I've plugged in an external drive and while it wouldn't show in my computer, it did so in disk management. It's been used as a data vault so I assume it had been formatted for linux as I'm pretty sure it's been plugged into a server or something. I deleted the volume and created a new simple partition. This is where my question comes in. I'ts a 2TB drive. A quick format would not work, it just wouldn't do it, so I tried a non-quick format and it seems to be working, however it's at 51% after nearly 9 hours. Does that indicate, as I suspect, that the drive is fucked or could it have something to do with the mini USB 2.0 connection?

Ta.

 

[Syri]

The USB 2.0 connection might slow things down a bit, but it does take quite some time to format large drives. If you're concerned it might be failing though, you can run a diagnostic check. The one built in to windows isn't that great, apart from repairing damaged files, but there are some decent free ones out there. I generally use a tool called GSmartControl for most drives, as it shows a good readout of any SMART errors that have been logged, and has some built in checks to run as well. It doesn't seem to like reading Seagate drives though, so if you're using one of those, you may be better with their own tool, SeaTools.

 

[Scouse]

That's pretty slow, but the mini USB 2.0 connection might be a thing as it's still progressing...