How long does it take for Linux to format a NTFS partition?
Linux is very good at handling a lot of filesystems, even the foreign ones, including Microsoft proprietary NTFS. Not only Linux is able to read and write on such a filesystem, it can also format a partition or an hard disk with such a filesystem. However, formatting a NTFS partition from Linux takes quite a long time… TL;DR: there is the-f (or -Q) option to mkfs.ntfs than enable quick formatting, that is your partition will be formatted in seconds or so.
But what happens if you don’t enable the fast formatting option mentioned above? According to the man page of mkfs.ntfs:
-f, --fast, -Q, --quick
Perform quick (fast) format. This will skip both zeroing of the volume and bad sector
checking.
In other words,
mkfs.ntfs will check and zero the disk.
So, to get some numbers, formatting a 1 TB hard disk (rotational) by Toshiba (via USB 3) tool:
% time sudo mkfs -t ntfs -L FLUCA_FILM /dev/sdc1
Cluster size has been automatically set to 4096 bytes.
Initializing device with zeroes: 100% - Done.
Creating NTFS volume structures.
mkntfs completed successfully. Have a nice day.
sudo mkfs -t ntfs -L FLUCA_FILM /dev/sdc1 0,00s user 0,01s system 0% cpu 3:03:53,28 total
It took three hours for the disk to be fully formatted, while enabling the quick formatting it requires one minute or so. Erasing the disk with
dd would have been surely faster (I’ve not tested, but I’ve done a lot of times before).
Quite frankly, I suspect that even Windows formats disks the quick way…