Formatting HDD and SSD

[saladcrack]

So I got a WD Black 2TB hard drive and am currently formatting it because I will be transferring my Steam games over to it in a couple days but I also got an SSD that will be my OS drive.  Do I need to format the SSD before I install Windows on it or can it format like as part of the Windows install?  I will probably format it beforehand to save some time on build day but I am new to formatting drives and just wanted some info, thanks!

[Zero_Hour]

You can format upon installation of windows. 

[bgibbz]

windows install will automatically format it. What you can do before hand though is run diskpart - clean. that will wipe all of the current partitions.

[saladcrack]

1 minute ago, bgibbz said:

windows install will automatically format it. What you can do before hand though is run diskpart - clean. that will wipe all of the current partitions.

It is a brand new drive so it doesn't have any partitions so I think I'll just let Windows take care of it on install.  Thanks for the info!

[Squish4058]

1 minute ago, bgibbz said:

windows install will automatically format it.

what he said, 

anyway its important to mention windows and most other formats are of the quick formats type, there is also the full format,

A quick format deletes the table that is a record where every byte of every file is (and bytes of the same file are not always together, so without an entry in a table any point on the HDD is treated as empty or has worthless data on it)
A full format does the above and manually goes to every lil byte on the drive and rezeros this. DO NOT FULL FORMAT AN SSD lol

[Squish4058]

4 minutes ago, bgibbz said:

windows install will automatically format it. What you can do before hand though is run diskpart - clean. that will wipe all of the current partitions.

Diskpart clean has fixxed so many of my broken corrupted usb drives lol

[saladcrack]

Just now, kris2340k said:

what he said, 

anyway its important to mention windows and most other formats are of the quick formats type, there is also the full format,

A quick format deletes the table that is a record where every byte of every file is (and bytes of the same file are not always together, so without an entry in a table any point on the HDD is treated as empty or has worthless data on it)
A full format does the above and manually goes to every lil byte on the drive and rezeros this. DO NOT FULL FORMAT AN SSD lol

Why should I not full format an SSD?  Is it ok to full format a HDD?

[Squish4058]

5 minutes ago, Gamessys said:

Why should I not full format an SSD?  Is it ok to full format a HDD?

Yeah hard drives are fine, be warned it freckin takes a long time. like seriously 200gb might take most of a day or so, also your pc will be fairly unusable for gaming or anything during said time.

SSD`s are all rated for a number of full writes, while it is a lot (say my ssd can have 3000TB or something written to it before it goes") 
Idk what the actual amounts are but the point is do not waste writing large 100gb + amounts to ssd`s, the amount of writes per cell on an SSD is a lot, LOT less than for a HDD

Edit: just to sum up, writing to an SSD degrades it, doing so to a HDD does not. How much degrades is tiny

[saladcrack]

Just now, kris2340k said:

Yeah hard drives are fine, be warned it freckin takes a long time. like seriously 200gb might take most of a day or so, also your pc will be fairly unusable for gaming or anything during said time.

SSD`s are all rated for a number of full writes, while it is a lot (say my ssd can have 3000TB or something written to it before it goes") 
Idk what the actual amounts are but the point is do not waste writing large 100gb + amounts to ssd`s, the amount of writes per cell on an SSD is a lot, LOT less than for a HDD

Ok I am currently full formatting my new WD 2tb drive and it's at 12% and has been going for about 15 minutes.  And if I understand correctly I should only install small programs onto SSDs?  Like Windows, Steam, Chrome and drivers etc but no huge games?

[saladcrack]

4 minutes ago, kris2340k said:

Yeah hard drives are fine, be warned it freckin takes a long time. like seriously 200gb might take most of a day or so, also your pc will be fairly unusable for gaming or anything during said time.

SSD`s are all rated for a number of full writes, while it is a lot (say my ssd can have 3000TB or something written to it before it goes") 
Idk what the actual amounts are but the point is do not waste writing large 100gb + amounts to ssd`s, the amount of writes per cell on an SSD is a lot, LOT less than for a HDD

Edit: just to sum up, writing to an SSD degrades it, doing so to a HDD does not. How much degrades is tiny

Also just to double check, I can't really play any games on my computer while it is formatting? Even if the games are on a different HDD?  Because I have everything on one 2tb drive and am formatting a seperate 2tb drive that doesn't have anything on it and is brand new.

[Squish4058]

Just now, Gamessys said:

Ok I am currently full formatting my new WD 2tb drive and it's at 12% and has been going for about 15 minutes.  And if I understand correctly I should only install small programs onto SSDs?  Like Windows, Steam, Chrome and drivers etc but no huge games?

No huge games will be fine, huge games will be something like 50GB and will load 1gb for every area your going to, 

 

Just be aware that ssd cells degrade on each write, hdd cells do not. How much they degrade is alsbolutely tiny. Ive probablt filled my SSD copying my steam library 40 times already and its fine. But yeah SSD cells DO degrade, HDD ones do not.
A full write will probably be okay, doing it for months on end is also probably not going to blow it up, just avoid full drive writes on ssd`s

[Captain_WD]

12 hours ago, Gamessys said:

~snip~

Hey there Gamessys

 

The guys gave you some great comments and suggestions. A few notes and tips from me:

- Fully formatting a SSD does degrade its lifespan as it does unnecessary writing to it and thus wears out the NAND cells on it. Since it's a brand new one you can simply leave the OS installer to handle this for you as it does that pretty quickly. It will format it anyway so you don't need to do this twice. 

- Are you doing a full format on the 2TB WD Black? Any reason for this? You should be OK with a simple quick format or a quick writing zeros with WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostic if you want to erase the data from the drive. 

- What is your current storage configuration? You should be able to use your system normally while formatting the drive but it may be slower than usual. I would simply leave the formatting process to finish before using the computer for anything demanding. 

 

Captain_WD.