I have a new nvme drive (Gen 4x4, 7500 MB/s) but formatting to ext4 in Gparted or Drives seems to take ages? How long should it take approximately as a minimum? And is there a quicker way to format an external nvme drive?
It should be fast. How is it connected? Also, what do you mean by “ages”?
It depends how you format the drive, full or quick
Quick: rebuilds the partition index, super fast
Full: overwrite every bit/byte so yes that will take some time (not sure how long, on hard disks it would take hours)
And as @dalto mentioned it also depends on how the disk is connected, if it is external through usb it will be much slower than directly connected to a motherboard m2 socket
I remember it used to be very fast formating ext4 (when i was using non-Zen kernel) ,but now it takes 10mins+ and still seems stuck no progess? Cant complete? Nothing to do with Zen kernel OI am using right? In the end i gave up formatting is and just used it unformatted for clonezilla clone disk-disk backup. I didnt choose full formatting either and its a relatively fast nvme drive. is there another way to format besides using Drives or Gparted?
You could always use a command line tool in a terminal:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/File_systems#Types_of_file_systems
you need to be extra careful to pick the right device to be formatted for not destroying other devices connected to your system
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I will try that next time because definitely Gparted and Discs app not working as it should…Ususally format is less than a minute but now over 10mins and it looks like it hanged…
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