How long does it usually take to format a 2TB external HD using ext4 and gparted?
Solution 1
It depends. Are you just formatting, or formatting and wiping the drive? How is the drive connected? USB 1/2/3? Firewire? eSATA?
Are there other partitions that need to be cleared off first?
Honestly, its probably going to take a while, so be patient.
Solution 2
It takes 17 minutes and 16 seconds.
Using: Ubuntu 10.04 amd64; gparted 0.7.1; mke2fs 1.41.11; USB2; a Western Digital Elements 2TB drive. This is just for the format; the partitioning was done in an earlier step.
Your mileage may vary.
Solution 3
Assuming that mke2fs
has to write data (e.g. for inode tables, journal, superblocks and accounting information) till only about 5% of the size of the filesystem and a write speed of 100 MB/s it would take under 17 minutes!
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Lucas
Updated on September 17, 2022Comments
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Lucas almost 2 years
How long does it usually take to format a 2TB external HD using ext4 and gparted?
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dronus over 10 yearsext4 can be formatted in a defered way, where most of formatting commences in background while the filesystem can already be used after a very short initalization period. Using
mkfs.ext4
, the option would be-E lazy_itable_init=1
, and this even is a default setting it seems. I don't know how to makegparted
using this option, but maybe it is possible. Using this feature, a 2GB partition gets available after about one minute.
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Matthew Flaschen over 13 yearsI came here to ask an uncannily similar question; I could ask it separately, but it would probably be a duplicate. I am stuck on the partition step. I told it to delete the pre-existing NTFS parition and create an ~1700 GB ext4 and ~300 GB ntfs. However, it has been on the "delete partition" step (for the pre-exisitng NTFS) for a very long time (well over a day). I am on a E1505, with Kubuntu 9.10, and USB 2.0. I have the same drive.
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Calroth over 13 yearsDeleting the partition should be (almost) instantaneous. It might be an idea to try unplugging and replugging your drive; if that doesn't work then try rebooting; and if that doesn't work, maybe download and boot from the gparted Live CD?
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Matthew Flaschen over 13 yearsthanks. That's what I originally thought, but then I rationalized that it might be zeroing the partition (although it was still really long). When I canceled, it segfaulted and printed
gpartedbin[17137]: segfault at 6b202d54 ip 06e671ef sp bfc1fb10 error 4 in libc-2.10.1.so[6dfc000+13e000]
. Of course, it shouldn't segfault regardless. But I'm not sure if it did so because I canceled, or it was already in "trouble". The fact that it took so long makes me suspect the latter. At any rate, when I check now, the partition table is empty. -
Matthew Flaschen over 13 yearsThe creation of the two new partitions was fairly quick and uneventful.