On Sat, 6 Nov 2010 19:22:23 -0000, "Gareth Magennis"
put finger to keyboard and composed:

Is there anything else I can try?

In your OP you state that a "physical format" requires 8 hours. I
presume this is a full zero-fill of the drive.

If so, then the average data transfer rate would be ...

40 x 10^9 / (8 x 3600) = 1.39 MB/s

FWIW, that's much slower than the slowest of the PIO or DMA modes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Atta...transfer_modes

Does your new drive, when truncated to 40GB, complete a physical
format in less time?

- Franc Zabkar
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