Prime 4 SSD Format First?

when formatting a drive does it matter if its quick format or full format when doing so?

Neither - as long as it’s exFat or Fat32 :slight_smile:

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Personally, but that is just me (hence personally, duh! LOL), I would never Quick Format a disk for our kind of use. Here’s why.

Quick Format only writes a new master boot record (MBR) to the disk and creates an empty index (the FAT in FAT32 or exFat) as there is nothing on the disk yet. It does NOT, however, check for bad sectors nor does it erase any information already on the disk.

For a new drive, checking for bad sectors is a good thing to get the best possible starting point. For an existing drive checking for bad sectors is also good (it IS a used driver after all) and you want all pre-existing data gone. During a full format a 0 will be written to every memory place giving you a drive (almost) as clean as a new one.

Also, having run into problems with native formatting tools in both Windows & Mac (while formatted according to correct settings drives still not working properly in third-party equipment), I have switched to a third-party tool for all HDD/SDD/USB related activities. My personal (free) tool of choice is MiniTool Partition Wizard, but there are others.

My 3 cents as usual.

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I followed as per instructions however I was not able to format the SSD via Prime 4. Nothing appeared on my desktop. Showing driver not available.I will now utilise a USB adaptor for the SSD and will format via my laptop then attach SSD to Prime 4.I have read other comments it does appear that’s the way to go. Hopefully that will work.

I could only format my new SSD separately on my pc. For me it was not possible to do it via controller mode on two different (high) end PC’s. Currently this does not seem possible on windows pc’s. Only route is format the new drive separately and then place it in the P4.

Are you running Windows? It can be a little trickier to format any new disk in Windows so I’d recommend checking online for your OS platform for formatting instructions.

@ Jay, are you asking me? Regards

I will thanks for your help.

Thats what I thought, thanks for letting me know.

Hi, no this was a reply to a comment from @DJMAD68

:slight_smile:

Dear Jay_DenonDJ,

I have followed your instructions and installed brand new SSD to P4 but I can not find a way to format it. Can you please update on the latest procedure to format SSD?

I made a short Windows tutorial, if you use that.

the manual says fat32 is recomended. but if you plan on ever using a mac. then exfat works for both.

FAT32 has a file size limit of 4GB. With large collections the database becomes bigger than that.

Manual needs to be altered, for example the need to power cycle after computer mode. Use ExFAT with MBR and never look back.

(My 2cents: please try not to bump nearly one year old replies unless adding something really worthwhile)

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Dear @Reese,

I was able to format after convert the SSD from MBR to GPT… Thank you…

If the disk is larger than 2TB GPT would be a fine choice.

Just got the Prime 4 when I install the ssd it gives me 3 partition options which one do i choose it’s a 1 TB SSD,thanks.

but the question you need to ask yourself is: do i need to do a disk partition?

I’m having same problem on windows laptop it’s connecting to laptop but won’t show drive up any ideas???

@LeeRuma, see my answer in that topic.