'format'

[datastorage]

1. can you format parts of a ssd or you have to format whole thing
2. can you format parts of a hdd or you have to format whole thing
3. what link shows explains this well with gif video? cant find

pls answer in a way so that any 4y old would understand

[Electronics Wizardy]

You can make partitions, so only part of a disk is formatted.

 

SSDs and HDDs will format the same way.

[WaggishOhio383]

You can format individual partitions if that is what you are asking. For what reason would you need to format part of a hard drive or SSD? Context would help to give good instructions.

[mariushm]

Search for "Disk Management"

 

In Windows 7, it's Start , right click on Computer , Manage ,  then Disk Management

 

There you see all your drives. You can select the drive you want to work with and then create or delete partitions , format them, give them drive letters and so on.

 

 

[datastorage]

20 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

 

is that yea or na am confused

 

pls answer in a way so that any 4y old would understand

[datastorage]

20 minutes ago, WaggishOhio383 said:

 format individual partitions 

what that mean

 

pls answer in a way so that any 4y old would understand

[mariushm]

2 minutes ago, datastorage said:

is that yea or na am confused

 

pls answer in a way so that any 4y old would understand

a 4yo would mind his own business and not mess with things he doesn't understand.

 

You most likely don't need to use partitions, but if you want to learn, just search Google for "hard disk partitions" or look on Youtube for some tutorials, enter "partition" in the youtube search

 

[datastorage]

4y old touch all kinds of things actually you should have 100+ babies u'll find out

 

 

still need answer

 

no good Clear sites out there

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 hours ago, datastorage said:

is that yea or na am confused

 

pls answer in a way so that any 4y old would understand

What is your goal when formatting here?

 

Yes you can format part of a drive

[homeap5]

You can format part of your drive or whole drive. This is pointless anyway - that's why people using quick format, which do basically nothing except settings few parameters.

 

If you mean full formatting like preparing all drive sectors for work, it's not necessary - they will work the same no matter if you format them or not.

[mariushm]

Formatting was necessary in the past with removable media (floppy disks) and with some hard drives. The manufacturing quality was not great, disks had uneven coating of ferromagnetic material, so on some floppy disks some tiny areas had to be marked as bad and avoided.

Also in order to be used, the disks had to have some data written on them, before writing actual data.

With mechanical drives, formatting is a way to check if the sector is reliable, if it can store and read bits correctly... if the drive is damaged or has a weak magnetic area, you can lose bits in some sectors ... so during full format, the program writes pattern in that sector and reads it back and repeats this procedure usually 2-3 times... if there's some read errors that sector is marked as bad and not used in the future.

Fast format skips this reliability check and just erases the file system information (list of files and all that)

 

Full formatting is not recommended on SSDs because it's pointless, they don't work as mechanical drives where there's a direct relationship between the sector number and the physical position on platters ,,,  for example on  mechanical drive you know sector 100 is for example on platter 1, surface 2 , track 100, cluster 4000 and so on, unless it was reallocated due to bad sectors. So you know the relative position on physical discs inside, and sector number always points to that location (unless reallocated)

With SSDs there's no direct relationship, the sector numbers change , the SSD controller constantly shuffles data around as needed to spread writes across all flash memory chips..  so if you try to format from sector 0 to sector 1 million there's no guarantee all 1 million sectors in flash memory chips will actually be written or tested.