How long should it take to format a hard drive to FAT32?

[chris]

How long should it take to format a hard drive to FAT32?

I'm just in the process of formatting a 1TB hard drive to FAT32 and its been formatting for just over 1 hour now and the bar is showing only 2% at this it will take about 50 houra to format !

 

[PaulR]

Ages!

I formatted a 120GB disc a while ago and it took hours.

 

[chris]

Great ! looks like the laptop will have to be left running over night.

 

[2cvbloke]

Yep, FAT32 takes ages, not to mention it's actually pretty wasteful in terms of efficiently marking the drive's useable parts, NTFS generally provides more space, unless it's for something non-windowsy, it's better to not use FAT32 on anything bigger than 20GB in my opinion as it was made for Windows 95/MSDOS 7, so it's old hat these days (not that NTFS is new, but it's still more efficient)...

 

[PaulR]

I would imagine that Chris is going to use it as an external drive for a PVR. That was why I used FAT32.

 

[Channel Hopper]

I thought the limit on FAT32 was 40GB ?

 

[PaulR]

That's an artificial limit imposed by Microsoft who would prefer you to use NTFS. FAT32 is wasteful of space, as 2CV says, but it IS non-proprietory.