What is formatting:
A formatting is in short to do e.g. a hard drive or USB pen ready to be used again, where you delete the data on the hard drive and free up space for what it is now to be used for, BUT do you now also delete the data?
There are two different methods of formatting in windows, one is express format (Quick format) and regular formatting also known as “Full format”, but what is the difference which you can format USB on Windows.
Quick Format:
This method is so definitely the most used method to format today, mainly due to the fact that it is much faster than a regular one. formatting and in the vast majority of cases it is not necessary to do anything else, the problem with this type of formatting is that the only thing it actually does is delete all references to the files on the disk and thus tell that the space is ready to be overwritten , because after an express formatting, all your files are still on the disk and can be recovered.
Why is this method so widely used? because it is fast and in 99.9% of cases people even use their disks again so that they know the data will be overwritten.
Formatting (Full format):
This method is so less used today as it can take a good while, but the reason why such formatting takes longer is that since Windows Vista (I mean) so while formatting it checks the disk for errors (bad sectors) and it finds some it tries to repair them. It also creates a new file system table, but the big time-waster in this formatting is something else, if you look on the web they write in many places that the data is removed from the disk which is a bit of a joke, what happens is that Windows simply overwrites all sectors with zero numbers and this is what takes time, so the data is not removed, it is overwritten.
Well, then, the data can not be recreated either? Yes, it can, but it gets significantly harder with each overwrites the hard drive gets.
(Beliefs the military formatting software overwrites their disks 8 or 9 times, but so is the military).
However, there are certain things to think about today, there is a “New” type of hard drive on the street called SSD (Solid State Drive), unlike the normal mechanical drives, SSD drives can only keep being written to a certain number of times and since full formatting overwrites the entire disk with zero numbers, it is recommended that you only use express formatting on these.
If you are going to run a full format, then it is not the end of the world, SSD disks can keep being written to many more times than before, but unless you have to get rid of your disks, you can just as well get used to using Express Formatting.
How do I Format?
If it is not already there, connect the disk to be formatted to your computer and open your explorer, explorer should open on “This computer page so you can see devices and drives, do not do this then tap this computer in the list out to the left, then it appears.
Then you find the disk you need to format and right-click on it, in the menu that pops up go down and press “Format”
And then this window will appear * The image below * in my case it is a 64Gb USB pen I am formatting.
Before you press “start”, just check that it is the correct disk, both in capacity and name, File system is shown by default for NTFS, if not then set it to it. (NTFS is the most common format today).
Allocation unit size you just leave at 4096bytes.
Now you have to choose the method you want to format and it is quite simple, if it is marked in express formatting it is what it does, if it is not marked it does a normal formatting. Once you have selected, press “Start”
After you have pressed start, a box will pop up with a warning that all the data on the disk will disappear and since that is the whole idea of formatting, just click on here.
And then it’s just waiting for it to finish and then the disk is formatted.
REMEMBER: that a normal formatting can take a lot longer than an express formatting.