My media drive (120 gig) went wonky on me recently. I was able to get it back and backed things up to an external drive. I picked up a 400 Gb WD hard drive. I partitioned it into four approximately 100 Gb partitions. the first two seem to be working fine, but G and H, well I am low level formatting them now, 1% in an hour or so, so by my calculations it will take 4.125 days to complete the format.

Hard drive activity light should be flickering like mad right? well, it's not.

I've never formatted a drive this large before but 4 days? 100 hours??

does that sound right or did I get a dud?


(system is 5 years old but still working like a charm. EIDE drive with a SATA adapter, system drive is SCSI, Its a Laird DVora system that came turn key. Laird told me to just swap the drive for an EIDE. )

My media drive (120 gig) went wonky on me recently. I was able to get it back and backed things up to an external drive. I picked up a 400 Gb WD hard drive. I partitioned it into four approximately 100 Gb partitions. the first two seem to be working fine, but G and H, well I am low level formatting them now, 1% in an hour or so, so by my calculations it will take 4.125 days to complete the format.

Hard drive activity light should be flickering like mad right? well, it's not.

I've never formatted a drive this large before but 4 days? 100 hours??

does that sound right or did I get a dud?


(system is 5 years old but still working like a charm. EIDE drive with a SATA adapter, system drive is SCSI, Its a Laird DVora system that came turn key. Laird told me to just swap the drive for an EIDE. )
From what I understand, a low-level format writes 0's to the entirety of the disk. I can see this taking a very long time, and if you have them split into partitions it can certainly take longer.

My advice is to do a quick format instead.

Thanks.

I got a replacement drive, and its basically the same thing. I have started a discussion in the Avid family forum, concerning SP2 and XDV 3.5 as it has been suggested I put on the service packs but I am concerned about Avid's reaction to that.