How long does it usually take to format a SCSI drive?

[Syntho]

I have a new 36GB drive on a 9600. The SCSI-2 bus is only 10mb/s so it's pretty slow. Usually when I format drives I never select low level format or zero all data. I save that only for when I have a problematic drive. For this new 36GB drive I didn't select any of that since I wanted a quick format, but it's been stuck on "installing device driver" for about 45 minutes now. Is that normal? Formatting a SATA drive takes like 5 seconds usually.

 

[uniserver]

what OS?   i use drive setup in 9.22 to set up all my drives.   and its instant.   set the partitions...  then initialize and bam...

 

[Syntho]

I'm using OS8.6. I had a feeling it was the size of the drive combined with the slow SCSI-2 bus. It's been stuck on "installing device driver" ever since I posted this. I almost want to turn the 9600 off and start over but that may be wasted time. The cursor is still moving and it has that spinning circle thing but I can't select windows or anything. The spinning circle will also blink every 15 seconds or so.

 

[uniserver]

Well,    my drives are 73gig, and they seem to init instantly,   The machine I format them with is a PM 7500, (100mhz) with a (333mhz new technologies G3 cpu card in there )

 

[Syntho]

SCSI drives, right? Not SATA or IDE with an adapter? My SATA drives are pretty much instant. SCSI seems to take longer though.

 

[Syntho]

SCSI Voodoo. Got it now. It initialized instantly.

 

[uniserver]

yup, 10k scsi,   yup sound like you had some ID/Termination issue there