Three and a half hour

I´ve read a review for the new Samsung 1TB. The review itself isn´t such an interesting piece of information. It´s a little fact, i didn´t thought of before albeit it´s obvious:

An attempt at reformatting the Spinpoint F1 still required 37 hours, but switching to a Windows XP MCE system saw the usual three and a half hours of formatting time emerge.

I assume, i´m really spoiled by a filesystem that comes back within seconds after adding it to a pool instead of waiting 3,5 hours. But this leads to an interesting observation: With the increasing capacity of harddisk and disks in the size of RAID arrays only a few years old, you need different concepts to integrate the storage in your system. Think about a 2 TB harddisk! Waiting 7 hours before you can use it?