When formatting a disk, flash drive or other drive in Windows 10, 8 and Windows 7 in different ways, you can select quick format (cleaning the table of contents) or not to choose it, thus performing a complete format. Having said this, for the novice user, it is often unclear what the difference is between fast and full formatting of a drive and which to select in each case.
In this material, details on the difference between quick and full formatting of a hard drive or USB flash drive, as well as which one is better to select according to the situation (including format alternatives for SSD).
Note: this post is about formatting in Windows 7 – Windows 10, some of the nuances given from full formatting work differently in XP.
Differences between fast and full disk formatting
To understand the difference between fast and full formatting of a drive in Windows, it is enough to know what happens in each case. I already anticipate that we are talking about formatting using the tools built into the system, as an example
- Formatting using the browser tools (right click on the drive in explorer – context menu option “Format”).
- Formatting in Windows Disk Management (right click on partition – “Format”).
- The format command in diskpart (to quickly format on the command line in this circumstance, you should use the quick parameter as in the screenshot. Without it a full format is performed).
- In the Windows installer.
Let's go directly to what is a fast format and a complete format and what exactly happens with the drive or pendrive in each option.
- Quick format. – This option writes a boot sector and an empty table of the selected file system (FAT32, NTFS, ExFAT) in unity. Disk space is marked as unused, without actually deleting the data it contains. Quick formatting takes much less time (hundreds or hundreds of times less) than a full format of the same drive.
- Full format – Complete formatting of a disk or flash drive, at the same time of the previous steps, also write zeros (In other words, erase) in all sectors of the unit (starting with Windows Vista) and checks the drive for bad sectors; yes there are, are repaired or marked accordingly to avoid writing to them in the future. This takes a long time, especially in the case of large hard drives.
In most cases, for normal work scenarios: quick disk cleaning for future use, when reinstalling Windows and other similar situations, a quick format is enough. Despite this, in some cases a full format may also be useful.
Quick or full format: which one to use and when to use it
As previously stated, express format is usually better and faster to use, but there may be exceptions where the full format is preferable. The next two points where a full format may be required are for hard drives and USB flash drives only, and SSD, Just after.
- If you plan to give the drive to someone else and are concerned that a stranger might retrieve data from it, it is best to do a full format. Files after quick format are recovered quite easily; see, as an example, Best software without data recovery costs.
- If you need to check the disk, or when a simple quick format (like a windows installation) then copy files with errors, leading to the assumption that the disk may contain bad sectors. Despite this, you may want to manually check the drive for bad sectors and then use a quick format: How to Check a Hard Drive for Errors.
Formatting SSD drives
SSDs excel at this matter. For them, in all cases, it is better to use the quick format, not the full format:
- If you do this on a modern operating system, you will not be able to recover data after a quick format of an SSD (starting with Windows 7, for SSDs the TRIM command is used when formatting).
- Formatting and writing zeros completely can be detrimental to the SSD. Despite this, i'm not sure windows 10 – 7 do it in SSD even if you choose the full format (sadly, I have not found any real information on this topic, but there are reasons to suppose that this is taken into account, as well as many other things, see Configuring SSDs for Windows 10).
I conclude here: I hope that, for some of the readers, the information was useful. If there are still questions, you can do them in the comments of this post.
