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Partitioning an External Drive

Asked by David Vincent-Jones

I am using GPARTED to partition and format my External WD 160 Gb. drive
The drive is the "passport" USB type.

The process appears to be exceptionally slow.
Approximately the formatting is taking about 1 hour for every 10 Gb. of space

I have 2 of these drives

Is this speed reasonable?

David

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zzzxxx
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Damiano Di Carlo (dldc) said : 		#1

Maybe you're using a computer with an old usb 1.1 interface?

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David Vincent-Jones (davidvj) said : 		#2

All 4 ports are USB 2.0 ... I wonder if there is something in my setup that makes the port think it is only 1.1?

Is there a way to check on this?

David

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Best zzzxxx (michalski-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#3

when your formatting an internal drive, you can expect about 25 gb/h on a 5400rpm (rotations per minute) drive. when your using an external drive, there are several factors that affect the speed, the connection type (USB/Serial/IEEE194), the rpm's of the drive, the filesystem your formatting to,

and sometimes external drives have processors in them, this means the computer can send the command and most of the work is done in the external drive, whereas a drive without a proccessor would have to send everything to and from the computer, as the computer is then acting as the brain, this slows it down.

hope this helps
Brian

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David Vincent-Jones (davidvj) said : 		#4

Brian;

Thank you for the feedback ... I guess I just need to be more patient.

David