How to quickly format a hard disk?

For most users, the first thing after getting a new, newly opened hard drive is of course to format the hard drive. But they have a choice: you can format a hard drive in either "quick format" or "full format".

Quick format, this takes only a short time, simply wipe the metadata and file allocation table of the hard disk. Full formatting is a sector-to-sector way in the hard disk, erasing metadata, etc. and checking for read and write errors.

Because of the more time it takes to fully format a hard drive, many people don't like it. They prefer to use fast format and work this way. At the same time, however, they are also concerned about whether they use quick format and there will be potential disk errors when using this drive in the future.

In most cases, there is nothing to damage using quick formatting. If you buy an enterprise-class hard drive or a consumer-grade hard drive with a three-year warranty, these drives have undergone a number of error tests to keep them running for long periods of time. This is also the reason for the higher price of enterprise and "expert" desktop hard drives: the higher the price of the hard drive, the more quality control checks are performed there.

Enterprise hard drive hardware and desktop hard drives use native hard drive error correction capabilities to identify bad sectors and redeploy data from them if needed. For example, a RAID array can perform an error scan and then recreate a driver on the mirrored device.

In the past 10 years, I have used (and replaced) at least 10 desktop hard drives from different vendors, different formats and different sizes of "Pro". The quick format used by each hard disk, and the only one failure I encountered was not related to the physical error of the hard disk. If you feel comfortable using detection when formatting, then use the appropriate method, but now this test is not as essential as it was 10 years ago.

Note: There is one exception when you use quick format, which is that you are ready to retire a hard drive from the service and you don't want any data to leak. Quick formatting simply erases the header data and file allocation tables of the volume, but does not erase the file itself. If you are completely convinced that the data on this hard drive has been erased, use a tool such as Eraser or Darik's Boot to delete all data from the hard drive.