Formatting Time for 4 1TB WD Green Drives in RAID 5?

[WhiteWidow]

I just built my storage rig together using the following Hardware.

Antec 300 case
GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3R
Intel E8400
4GB CORSAIR DDR 800
600 W OZC Power Supply
ASUS EAH3450/DI/256M Radeon HD 3450

[VorLonUK]

Re: Formatting Time for 4 1TB WD Green Drives in RAID 5?

A Quick Format will take very little time, as it doesn't check the media. Always a good idea though to fully check a brand new hard drive with the hard drive manufacturers self booting tools before you partition and/or install an OS.

It does sound like windows is checking the integrity over all 4 disks, ie the Raid array and the physical media (by performing a full format). As for the time spent so far, I can't comment as I've never setup raid 5.
This is one of the reasons though I recommend checking the drives individually with the hard drive manufacturers self booting tools before a raid/format/OS install just to make sure that the drives surface and mechanics are all ok.
Nothing but a pain to setup a large raid array just to find near on from the outset that a drive has problems or a large amount of reallocated sectors early in its life.
A Full format checks for bad sectors, which significantly adds to formatting time too, let alone building the array.

Checking across the web it seems that as windows performs so many data integrity checks when formatting a RAID 5 volume it is a very slow process indeed, with parity-building taking up the bulk of the time.