Professional SSD. Software Downloads. Difference between a "normal" and a "quick" format When formatting a drive, Windows offers the option to "Perform a quick format". The reason for this behavior is explained on Microsoft's website: "When you choose to run a regular format on a volume, files are removed from the volume that you are formatting and the hard disk is scanned for bad sectors.
Europe, Middle East, Africa. I understand the technical difference between the two: quick formatting just tells the drives that all the sectors are writable, and doesn't really delete any data The drive just writes over existing sectors as and when needed, while a hard format will clean the HDD completely, and wipe all data, write 0's everywhere I think. A full format does not just clean the partition table data, it also checks every sector on the disk surface for corrupted ones.
This is primarily why it takes so much longer to perform then a quick format. A quick format just rewrites the partition tables. From a performance standpoint, there is no difference. When the HDD writes a file to the disk, it just finds the next available "free sector", and overwrites whatever is there regardless of whether or not it is a 0 or a 1.
Think of it like this: a quick format just "deletes" all of the files, whereas a full format performs a sector check of the drive surface, and depending on the formatting utility, may fill the drive with zeroes the default format utilities included with Windows do not zero-fill the drive.
Most disk manufacturers provide diagnostic utilities which include the ability to do this. If the drive is brand new, you should be fine with a quick format. If the drive has corrupted sectors or even if you think that it does , it would be worth your time to do the full format.
If you want to play it safe, ensure that you do at least one full format to the drive. That should reveal all bad sectors, and from then on, you can just do quick formats. I use Western Digital's Data Lifeguard tool to zero fill drives, it will do any brand. Once it is done the drive becomes "unitialized" in disk management, back to a factory state. This leads me to believe it writes to sectors a format does not. I use this on drives that have problems installing an OS to when there was a previous installation, solves all kinds of weird problems.
As others have said doing a full format checks the entire disk, typically by writing data to it all ones or all zeros and then checking to make sure the written data is correct. If the data is not correct then an entry is made in a table that keeps track of bad sectors. I'm trying to be generic here because there are quite a few OSs. Since the format identified bad sectors, those sectors can never be written to since they were recorded in the appropriate table.
They are never free sectors in other words. When someone says you only need to do a full format only once, I don't know how effective that is for disk integrity. As a disk gets older you are more likely, not less likely to have surface areas develop problems. If you are wondering if a full format wipes the disk clean, in most OSs it does since it had to write data to read it back to ensure good sectors.
So if you are wondering about security of data that you are putting on the disk, doing a full format ensures that you don't write to a bad sector.
Even though newer disks reserve some sectors in case others go bad sectors that otherwise don't get written to , that still hasn't saved me in the past. I had a patch of bad sectors at the end of a disk, and of course I didn't know about it until the disk filled up.
Once I started writing to that part of the disk I started getting write errors, and it would hang up my computer for a little bit. The disk couldn't recover from it and the data was lost. How best to erase the data is the decision that needs to be made.
A Quick Format is quick. To make the formatting process quick, the drive is not checked for bad sectors. Anyone looking at the hard drive or storage device would not see any data and assume the drive is erased. Unfortunately, the files are actually still there and the volume could be re-built, to gain access to the files again.
A Full Format runs an additional step that checks the hard drive for any bad sectors. This check is what makes the full format take longer than a quick format.
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