Should i use quick format

Hard Drives. Solid State Drives. Mobile Drive. Professional SSD. Software Downloads. High-level formatting might include scanning the disk for bad sectors check if every sector can be read , and it might include writing zeroes to all data sectors on the disk. When you format a disk, Windows XP does a high level format and it writes a file system structure to the disk. Accessing each sector on the disk takes much more time than the quick format, which only writes the blocks that contain the file system structure.

So normally a quick format is what you want because it is much faster. But there are cases where you might want to do a full format. You might have a disk that you want to destroy or give away.

If you just do a quick format, then the file data is still on the disk, only the file system structure file names and information where the files are stored on the disk are deleted. You might not be sure if the hard disk is in a good state. Then a full format is a good idea because it accesses every sector, so if any sector is bad, this will be recognized. With a quick format only a few sectors will be written to. With bad luck you end up with a successful quick format, and when you want to write data to the disk later, it fails.

Then you will probably be wishing you had done a full format that would have checked the entire disk right at the beginning. You asked about risks and consistency. I wrote about the risks above. The formatting operated by computer users is high-level formatting. And this formatting is operated on partitions. However, the high-level formatting is specifically divided into two modes in the actual operations: quick format and full format it is also called general format.

The differences between quick format vs. A good knowledge about them will help computer users make best use of disk. First, let's take formatting in Windows Explorer and Disk Management as examples. When computer users format a partition, quick format is checked by default. If they uncheck quick format, full format mode is selected automatically. Then click Format. Then, right click a partition and select Format. Then, type "diskpart" to open diskpart window. What is the difference between quick format and full format?

Many people are concerned about these questions. To figure out these problems, computer users must know what happens when they format partition with quick format vs. Quick format will "delete" files from the partition and rebuild the file system , volume label, and cluster size. It is faster than full format.

However, it's not the real sense of formatting. Pay attention that I used the word "delete", not "erase". That means that quick format doesn't really erase all the data.

It just marks the partition as "formatted" and destroys the journal that keeps tracks of the files and their locations on hard drive. So, the data is still on the hard drive and it can be easily recovered by a data recovery software before it is overwritten.

Full format will clear files completely from the partition, rebuild the file system, volume label, and cluster size, and scan partition for logical bad sectors that's why full format is slower than quick format. It is the real sense of formatting and that's why some people are afraid of it. In Windows with the versions Windows XP and earlier, full format just had the additional bad sector scanning function compared to quick format.

That means that data can be easily recovered in these Windows operating system even if full format is performed. But full format is changed in Windows Vista and later Windows versions, it will erase original data, write zeros to the whole partition, and finally erase zeroes again to avoid the possibility of data recovery.

So, full format does erase all data. Generally speaking, data that is fully formatted in Windows Vista and later Windows versions will not be able to be recovered by data recovery software. However, some people still think that data can be recovered with more advanced technology through the residual magnetism on disk. Then, how to make data unrecoverable to guarantee users' data recovery? Many people may wonder about that.