Reformatting question

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Getting a new external HD. The two that I’m considering as possibilities are an 8TB WD\My Book or an 8TB Seagate expansion. Formatting I want is NTFS. Now!
The Seagate is (supposedly) NTFS right out of the box, but my preference (due to familiarity with their products), is the WD. Problem is that the WD (as I understand it), is formatted as “ExFat” (whatever the h—) that is. Granted, I can reformat it to NTFS and be good to go, but at 8TB,I don’t know how long that reformat might take. Up to a couple of hours I can maybe deal with but all day (or all night) is another matter entirely.
‘Puter’s a Win10Pro, with 16G’s of RAM. Processor’s an Intel core I7, 2.5Ghz.
So! Question!! About how long might it take to do that reformat?

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The size shouldn’t make a big difference in format time. Unless you aren’t doing a quick format. But all a non-quick format does is read every sector once.

Better to do a quick format and then a smart long self-test and look at the smart data than to let windows format tool do its poor quality diagnostics(read once, tell you nothing) on it.

http://gsmartcontrol.sourceforge.net/home/

One issue I have with WD is many of their external drives are hard wired USB. That means if something goes wrong and you need to take the enclosure apart for direct access to the SATA port to recover your data you can’t and are stuck with USB only. (well I guess you could solder on your own SATA port, but that’s a little crazy — even if it does work)

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Izzy11201

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My personal preference has always been for WD drives, internal and external.  I have used WD drives exclusively in all my PC builds for over 15 years, and have never had one fail.  I kept a few in service for 10 years before retiring them.

I have two 1TB USB MyBooks that I have also been running for many years without issues.  I only wish they were USB3 now, instead of USB2.

I recently bought a portable WD Elements 2.5″ USB3 (bus powered) drive for daily image backups, and it works great.  Already formatted for NTFS out of the box.

I did try a Seagate 2TB USB that was on sale a few years ago.  I think it barely lasted a year before I started getting errors, then complete failure.  I’m not saying they are all bad, just reporting my personal experience.

As far as formatting times, read this article from WD:

Quick Format vs. Full Format during Windows installation or in Windows Disk management

https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=1217

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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Izzy11201

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Thanks for the replies. They and that WD knowledge base article, pretty much settle it. Quick format option’s a good point, I hadn’t thought of that.

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