Does a new External Hard Drive Need to be Formatted?

[GunXpatriot]

So I just got a My Book 4TB because my 1TB HDD is at its limit. Plus, I'm on the road now, and I'll be gone for a bit, so between taking hundreds of photos and GB upon GB of video, I need a place to dump all of this stuff. In a couple months, I'll likely get another 4TB and turn it into a "mock RAID" setup, or something...

Anyway, is there any reason to format this HDD before I use it? I used to do this, but in the last couple of years, I've never really known whether it was necessary or not. If it is necessary, should it be a full format or quick format? You'd think none of this would be necessary immediately out of the box, but you know, just in case...

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Headzyy]

When you plug it in does it say that you have 4tb free of 4tb, if so then no need to format. If you want to though just use quick format.
Hope it helps

 

[GunXpatriot]

It says like 3.64 free of 4TB, but there's nothing on it. Just that usual mis-representation of storage capacity. 🙁

Alright, I'll try that I think. Thanks!

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there, GunXpatriot!

You wouldn't need to format your WD My Book external drive. The drive comes pre-formatted in NTFS for use with Windows OS. If you have a Mac OS computer, that's when you might want to consider reformatting the drive. Otherwise you should be good to go with transferring of data once you take it out of the box.
The visible 3.64 TB capacity on an empty HDD is actually exactly how it should appear. A 4 TB drive is, in fact, 4,000,000,000,000 bytes. Since 1 KB = 1024 bytes, 1 MB = 1024 KB, etc. Once you do the math, you'd find that having 3.64 TB usable capacity is actually normal.
However, on the standard metric system the drive is 4 TB and that's why it is presented that way.

If you want to reformat it though, you can refer to our KB article about partitioning & formatting: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=M9r42d

Hope this was helpful! Keep me posted if you have more questions!
SuperSoph_WD

 

[GunXpatriot]

Great, thanks for the quick response, SuperSoph_WD. Thanks for clearing that up, and I'm sure that info will be helpful in the future.