Totally OT, but frustrated.....

[Wai-Sun Chia]

On Fri, 25 Mar 2005 01:10:35 -0500, David V. Corbin
<dvcorbin at optonline.net> wrote:
> Others are just economies of scale. Consider disdk formatting. If you look
> at MB/S then today's drives are MUCH faster.  If yuou look at "how long does
> it take to format this new drive", then the answer is about the same.

Well, I can offer an exception, but it is surely OT... :-}
ReiserFS. It "formats" the disks the same amount of time regardless of
the disk size/capacity, so format time is O(1) wrt to capacity. This
is my personal experience too, I've used 4G, 9G and 20G disks with
ReiserFS. It all "formatted" less than 5s.

Not an expert, just a user, but AFAIK it only formats the space
require for its internal journal and some metadata.

In Linux, you just, pluck in a raw disk, and do a:

#mkfs -t reiserfs /dev/sda1 and that's it, typically done below 5s.

OTOH, if you use ext2/ext3....well...

/wai-sun