Vista; time to format external = slightly more than one ice age?

Is this just my two systems or what? I tried to full format two 750GB external HDs using Vista (SP1), one via USB, one via Firewire connection. The USB format ran overnight, approx. 8 hours and it was about 1/3rd finished when I said this is ridiculous and killed it. With the 1394 on the other Vista, same thing except I let it run less than one hour and it only had the first blue bump in the progress bar showing, indicating it was looking like another 24-36 hour task. Xp handled both full formats in the timely fashion I have come to expect (two or three hours maybe? I'm never sure since I usually start and walk on formats).

Anyone know why its so dead dog slow on Vista or what I'm missing to get normal speed formats?

Also, I just fired up Premiere Elements and I was going to do a little editing across the network which is a little slow in XP (compared to a file that's native to the machine) but again, its dead dog slow in Vista to generate what Premiere calls a Peak file, which I think is a sort of indexed meta-edit file. In XP it might take 1.5 to 2 minutes to generate that file over the network with a .650 gig source wave file. So far the first Peak file generation took 36 minutes in Vista and the second is not looking any faster.

So what gives there? I looks like a poor network interaction to me.

Other than that, I really don't have any complaints about speed and performance and it was in fact because the two systems running Vista are more capable that I was trying to use them for formatting and network editing.

Anyway, defenders of Vista unite, and tell me what's going on...

 

Found a KB article (941961) that describes what might be the problem. Seems a full format in Vista writes zeroes to the target drive (once? twice? DOD?) and something in the methodology triggers premature allocation of backing space with a volume storage provider like SAN. Now, if I could have the plain English version...

It doesn't exactly say what the problem's symptoms are nor does it say if an ordinary external drive applies but at least its a hypothesis. The solution of course is not what a person always wants to follow; quick format, or better, use XP.


Nothing forthcoming on the nuts and bolts of why indexing a file from across a local network is so slow, though again the solution is to use XP instead.