How Long Does It Take to Format a Hard Drive? Hard Drive Takes Forever to Format Fixes

Top 4 Fixes for Fixing a Hard Drive Taking Forever to Format

When you're running into an unlikely finished disk formatting problem in a Windows PC, stop for a while, and pick up the four viable solutions. You can learn "how long does it take to format a hard drive" and fix "hard drive taking forever to format" easily.

Format Hard Drive Takes Too Long! Why Does Formatting Take So Long?

Case 1 - "Hi, I got stuck at formatting a 500GB Seagate external hard drive in Windows 11/10 and need your help. How long does it take to format a 500GB hard drive? It seems that my hard drive takes forever to format. Is there a faster way to format the drive instead of the typical Windows way?"

Case 2 - "Hi, I have a hard drive (an HGST 500gb with 7200RPM) connected with a SATA to USB cable. After 2,5 hours of waiting to be formated (not the quick format), I canceled the procedure. Is it too long or is it my idea? Is there a faster way to format the drive instead of the typical windows way(right-click on the drive in my computer-properties, format)? Thanks in advance!"

Also read: Windows 11 Slot Boot SSD

How Long Does It Take to Format a Hard Drive

You may be wondering during the formatting process:

• How long does a full format take?
• How long to format a 1TB hard drive?
• How long does it take to format a 2TB hard drive?

Speaking of formatting a hard drive in Windows Explorer or Windows Disk Management, there is no set time to tell how long does formatting a hard drive take. However, the process bar should never cease, not hanging there and even not responding.

For your information, you can always format a hard drive within minutes or half an hour, depending on the hard drive capacity and used space on it. As estimated, to do a "full format" on a 1TB hard disk in Windows, it will take a long time, like 2- hours, and over a USB 2.0 connection, it may take a day! In contrast, to do a "quick" format is much faster, usually several minutes.

Why is your hard drive taking forever to format? One of the most common reasons is that you forget to tick the "quick format" option when you don't want a full format. Another reason that makes format taking a long time is that your hard drive has a bad sector. You can solve the hard drive taking forever to format with four useful tips.

Also read: Windows Update Taking Forever

Fix 1. Use a Third-party Hard Drive Format Utility

How long to format hard drive? Learn carefully from the do-it-yourself ways of troubleshooting hard drive that takes too long to format in the Windows operating system on a computer or laptop, with the help of the disk format tool - EaseUS Partition Master. 

This free partition manager does well in managing hard disk partitions by resizing, deleting, formatting, creating, and many other features that wait for you to explore. 

Highlights:

• Adjust partition space with easy steps
• Merge partitions Windows 10 without losing data
• Convert to GPT or MBR in Windows 11/10/8/7
• Clone a hard drive to another one to replace disk

Steps to format a hard drive or SSD with EaseUS Partition Master:

Step 1. Run EaseUS Partition Master, right-click the hard drive partition you intend to format and choose "Format".

Step 2. In the new window, set the Partition label, File system (NTFS/FAT32/EXT2/EXT3/EXT4/exFAT), and Cluster size for the partition to be formatted, then click "OK".

Step 3. Then you will see a warning window, click "Yes" in it to continue.

Step 4. Click the "Execute 1 Task(s)" button to review the changes, then click "Apply" to start formatting the partition on your hard drive.

Also Read: How Long Does It Take to Format a 4TB Hard Drive

Fix 2. Delete Partitions and Create New Ones Instead of Formatting

If using a Windows alternative method still fails to shorten the formatting time, don't be upset, continue using the EaseUS Partition Master, let's try the other workaround. Many users stuck in the same situation solved the problem by deleting the available partitions on the hard disk and creating new ones.

Steps to delete and create partitions:

Step 1. Launch EaseUS Partition Master, and click "Partition Manager".

Make sure that you've backed up the important data before deleting any partition on your disk.

Step 2. Select to delete partition or delete all partitions on hard drive.

• Delete single partition: right-click on a partition that you want to delete and choose "Delete".
• Delete all partitions: right-click a hard drive that you want to delete all partitions, and select "Delete All".

Step 3. Click "Yes" to confirm the deletion.

Step 4. Click "Execute xx Task" and then click "Apply" to save the change.

0:00 - 0:26 Delete single volumes; 0:27 - 0:53 Delete all partitions.

Steps to create new partitions:

Now the partition or partitions should become unallocated space, to use it normally to store data, just create a new partition and give a proper file system on it with the EaseUS software.

Step 1. On the main window, right-click on the unallocated space on your hard drive or external storage device and select "Create".

Step 2. Set the partition size, partition label, drive letter, file system, etc. for the new partition and click "OK" to continue.

Step 3. Click the "Execute Operation" button at the top corner and keep all changes by clicking "Apply".

Other Method You Need:

Fix 3. Format via a SATA Cable Connection

If the problem is with an external USB hard drive, perhaps trying to plug it out from your computer, use a proper USB cable for connection would help get rid of the formatting trouble. Good luck.

Fix 4. Check Bad Sectors for Your Hard Drive

If there is a bad sector on your hard drive, your format process could take a long time. To figure out if there is a bad sector, you can run EaseUS partition software again. Let's see how it works:

Step 1. Open EaseUS Partition Master. Go to Toolkit and select "Bad Sector Scan."

Step 2. Tick "Scan Disk" and choose the target disk from the drop-down menu.

Step 3. Click "Scan" to apply the bad sector scaning process.

After locating the bad sector on your external drive, you can subdivide the bad sector into an independent unallocated space or use other tools to repair bad sectors.

Conclusion

At last, we hope that you've rectified the problem without hanging on the formatting process anymore. For those whom we didn't help on this page, please make more efforts other than the mentioned four fixes.

Format HDD Taking Forever FAQs

1. Why does it take so long to format a hard drive?

• One of the most common reasons is that you forget to tick the "quick format" option when you don't want a full format.
• The other reason is that the scan for bad sectors is the reason why the Full format takes twice as long as the Quick format. Bad sectors that are not located can cause damage to the hard drive.

2. How long should formatting a hard drive take?

For your information, you can always format a hard drive within minutes or half an hour, depending on the hard drive capacity and used space on it. As estimated, to do a 'full' format on a 1TB hard disk in Windows will take a long time, like 2- hours, and over a USB 2.0 connection, it may take a day!

3. Does a quick format erase all data?

A quick format doesn't erase data to make data unrecoverable. It just "deletes" data and you can recover these data as long as these data are not overwritten.