SCB

Agreed, please do include SAS. I was quite surprised (and disappointed) after buying my first set of SAS drives and finding that my StableBit stuff can't see much about them.

Thanks. Yeah nothing so far. I don't want to jab the guy with a support request over something so small. Maybe he will choose to answer here though. I am still doing my drives, one by one, and they each take several days: about three days to evacuate a drive via drive usage balancer, another full day to hard format it, and then another three days or so to add it back and let it re-balance everything (this overlaps with the three days to evacuate the next drive for format). So really, four days per drive with the overlap. If I could quick-format that would cut it down a day. Windows auto-update has already boned me twice though by interrupting the drive format with a reboot (you'd think it would stop itself from doing that, but alas...) so now I have that shut off too. Anyway- I have 16 large drives here, even saving one day per would mean saving many days. As it is now, this little adventure in optimization will take me 64 days to complete. Sorry if I sounded a bit persnickety about being accused of a thread hijack. I always thought it best for one topic to remain in one place, rather than the same question in a dozen places with a dozen answer sets. I know that drives me nuts when I'm trying to figure something out with Google-Fu. Maybe not everyone feels the same way though

Thanks. I am not unfamiliar with forum decorum. However my case is exactly the same as that which is discussed above: I am reformatting drives for 64kb. So I do believe it is pertinent to the topic in this case. I've been using these drives for awhile. I don't know whether I hard formatted a particular drive. Some I did, some I did not, when I started using them and I made no effort to label exactly how I commissioned them. So what I am mostly looking for here is whether or not the drivepool scanner performs the same function (marking any bad sectors) as does a hard format. Likely only Christopher can answer this (another reason I posted it here). These drives have been deep scanned many times (once per month, averaging over a year or two) by SBscanner already. Hence, my question.

I am also doing this now and ran across this post. Question: is there any real benefit to doing a "hard" format, or is the quick format good enough? The hard formats of my 12TB 5400 RPM drives are taking forever. I was think maybe the covecube scanner app checks them out thoroughly anyway, so I could skip the hard format.