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FDISK Speed

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by elwin9

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When you use fdisk on a Western Digitial HDD it flys through the process. Other brands are fairly consistant in the time it takes. The speed of the drives are nothing great, I've been cruious to why this is so. I've just had to fdisk 10 5400rpm WD Hdd which prompt me to ask the question. This stuff bugs me till I find out.
Thanks to all.

5 replies

by thechas

The key factors for all HDD operations are the access speed, and the read-write speed.
The RPM mainly impacts search speeds.

When you are partitioning or formating, the primary factor is the read-write speed, along with the data transfer rate for the IDE controller.

The size of the drive/partition also impacts fdisk speeds, as the FAT uses the most space as you approach cluster size step points.

Due to cluster size, a 15GB drive will take longer to partition and format than a 18GB drive of the exact same family.

The number and structure of the platters also will impact fdisk speed.

I don't have any formulas to estimate fdisk times. The net number of clusters is likely the most significant factor.

Chas

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