Initializing External Drive
 

I know I am supposed to keep Journaled off when initializing a drive... I noticed the options button on the bottom and was wondering if i am supposed to enable ZERO ALL DATA or enable 8 WAY RANDOM WRITE FORMAT? My system is still crapping out cause of too many plug ins even though I am now at 1 gig of RAM... is it because of either of these options? Thanks

Re: Initializing External Drive
 

These are simply options for security concerns when you initialize your drive, and really the only reason to use them is if you're selling your computer and want to make sure that no one can recover your files. So to answer your question, you don't need to worry about these options. They have nothing to do with your performance.

If you want the techy explanation of what's going on, here ya go. You basically write zeros and ones to you drive when you save files to it (binary data). To initialize / erase the data, you have 3 options:

A) Initialize : If you think of your hard drive as a book full of pages, it needs a table of contents in order to know what's in it and where to find it. Quick initialization simply removes the table of contents so when you write NEW files, the disk ignores the old ones and eventually rewrites over them.

B) Zero all data: This actually writes Zeros to your drive, replacing all the old data. Obviously this can take a while (hours), but because it OVERWRITES your old files, it's harder to recover them... hence the added security.

C) Random write: This is an even more secure way of initializing because it writes random zeros and ones to your drive. So if you're really paranoid about someone recovering your old data, you'd use this option.