Should i format my hard drive

If you previously partitioned your system to separate partitions, such as when dual-booting two different operating systems, your computer treats each partition as its own drive.

When formatting a hard drive, you can create a single partition in place of several partitions, giving you better use of all your hard drive space. Ashley Poland has been writing since She has worked with local online businesses, supplying print and web content, and pursues an active interest in the computer, technology and gaming industries.

In addition to content writing, Poland is also a fiction writer. She studied creative writing at Kansas State University. Reformatting will delete all the data stored on the drive, so if you need to reformat, do so as soon as you buy the drive.

If you already have data stored on the drive, back that data up elsewhere, reformat the drive, and then put your data back on the drive. Note: Using the formatting options above on a drive that has data on it may not be enough to prevent some of that data from being recoverable.

In the Volume label textbox, enter whatever name you'd like to give to the drive. If the drive had a previous name and that makes sense for you, by all means, keep it. Drive letters are assigned during the Windows partitioning process but can easily be changed after the format is complete.

See How to Change Drive Letters after the format process is done if you'd like to do that. Next up is the file system choice. NTFS is the most recent file system available and is almost always the best choice. Only choose FAT32 FAT—which is actually FAT16—isn't available unless the drive is 2 GB or smaller if you are specifically told to do so by a program's instructions that you're planning on using on the drive. This is not common. In the Allocation unit size textbox, choose Default.

The best allocation size based on the size of the hard drive will be chosen. It's not at all common to set a custom allocation unit size when formatting a hard drive in Windows. Next is the Perform a quick format checkbox. Windows will check this box by default, suggesting that you do a "quick format" but we recommend that you uncheck this box so that a "standard format" is performed.

In a standard format , each individual "part" of the hard drive, called a sector, is checked for errors and overwritten with a zero —a sometimes painfully slow process.

This procedure ensures that the hard drive is physically working as expected, that each sector is a reliable place to store data, and that existing data is unrecoverable. In a quick format , this bad sector search and basic data sanitization is skipped entirely and Windows assumes that the hard drive is free of errors. A quick format is very fast. You, of course, can do whatever you like—either method will get the drive formatted. However, especially for older and brand new drives, we'd prefer to take our time and do the error checking right now instead of letting our important data do the testing for us later on.

The data sanitization aspect of a full format is nice, too, if you're planning on selling or disposing of this drive. The final format option is the Enable file and folder compression setting that is unchecked by default, which we recommend sticking with. The file and folder compression feature allows you to choose files or folders to be compressed and decompressed on the fly, potentially offering considerable savings on hard drive space.

The downside here is that performance can be equally affected, making your day-to-day Windows use much slower than it would be without compression enabled. File and folder compression has little use in today's world of very large and very inexpensive hard drives. In all but the rarest occasions, a modern computer with a large hard drive is better off protecting all the processing power it can and skipping on the hard drive space savings. Review the settings you've made in the last several steps and then click OK.

As a reminder, here's what you should see:. Look back at whatever previous steps you need to if you're wondering why these are the best options. Windows is usually pretty good about warning you before you might do something damaging, and a hard drive format is no exception.

Formatting a hard drive means to delete all the data on the drive and set a file system to prepare an available space for the operating system. Disk formatting is the process of preparing a data storage device such as a hard drive, sloid state drive for initial use. Formatting can be divided into three parts. In some cases, formatting can also create one or more new file systems.

Partitioning is a generic term in the second part of the process that makes data storage device visible to the operating system. In some operating systems, all parts or certain parts of the process can be combined or repeated at different levels.

If not specified, hard disk formatting refers to high level formatting, while floppy disk formatting usually contains two formats at the same time. Does formatting a disk erase data?

No, format is not the same as erase. As most hard disks have been formatted at the factory, formatting is only required when the hard drive media has errors. Do you want to know what does formatting a hard drive do? If you don't know, keep reading. What does format mean to you?

Protect your privacy by deleting your private information or cause data loss? In fact, things are not as simple as they look like on the surface. If you have some benefits because of the formatting operation, what are they? Here are some things you need to know about formatting a hard drive. There are two most direct effects of formatting a hard drive. One of the most direct effects of formatting a drive is that all the data on the drive will be removed. As a result, you may lose your important data.

Hence, making sure your data has been backed up before formatting the drive is crucial. You may have noticed that you can select the file system when you format a hard drive.

That means you can change you file system by formatting the drive. If you operate this on Windows Disk Management, you cannot finish this operation.