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I have started to reformat a few of my external hard drives to help improve their performance. I know  that I can do a Quick format that takes a very short time. The other option (remove the check mark in the quick box) ) seems to take hours--more than 6--to complete about half of a 4 TB drive. 

Is it worth the extra time? 

What do I gain by the "long" method over the Quick? 

The main difference is when you choose to run a Full format on a volume, files are removed from the volume that you are formatting and the hard disk is scanned for bad sectors. If you choose the Quick format option, the format removes files from the partition, but does not scan the disk for bad sectors.

If these drives have never had a Full format it's probably a good idea if you plan to use them for any critical data storage.

Actually it doesn't even remove the files when you do a quick format. It just erases the File Allocation Table or the table of contents. As long as you do nothing to the drive after a quick format, all files are recoverable.

Thank you for the information. Looks like a full format is what I will do.

Joe