Question: When formatting my hard drives or USB flash drives, I’ve always seen the “Capacity” cascade menu with only one option. The image below is taken when trying to format a 1 TB HDD on Windows 10.
If there’s never been a second choice, why does this option exist in the first place?
This behavior is consistent across XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10 in more than ten years of my experience using a Windows OS.
Answer: When formatting a floppy, I expect the same dialog to give a choice:
- 3.5”, 1.44MB, 512 bytes/sector
- 3.5”, 720KB, 512 bytes/sector
Currently I have no access to a floppy drive to confirm this, but on this page there is a picture that shows a “Format A:” window with these options. It comes from a time when “”formatting”” would actually initialize the physical structure of the medium �C not just write some data for creating a filesystem.
Source: http://www.buildorbuy.org/images/floppywin2.png
It’s possible other media (nowadays uncommon media) provide more than one option as well.
“