Windows Installing Vista On New Drive w/o Formatting

I got a new hard drive today, and inserted my Vista disc into my PC.

I split the unallocated space into two partitions. A 463GB one and a 97GB one.

I forgot to hit "format" on the 97GB one (the partition form my OS) and clicked "next." Windows proceeded to install. Windows finished installing in ~15 minutes, and on the fresh installation, it shows it formatted as NTFS. The other drive was unformatted and is currently being formatted to NTFS, and it's taking forever.

So the Windows installation clearly automatically formatted the 97GB partition. But would it have been better to have manually formatted it first? It happened so quickly... is this simply because it's only 97GB? Or did it not do a proper format? Maybe it did a "quick format?" Would that be bad?

This 463GB partition is taking ages to format. Then again, it's nearly 5x bigger. Advice?

 

A full format on a drive of that size will plod along, the only way to do it quicker is to cancel it and restart it with a quick format

 

Okay, then. I guess my question is: Is letting Windows quick format the fresh drive as it installs worse than fully formatting it prior to installation?

 

Na not really, full formats are generally used for older drives, i quick formatted all mine, *touch wood* and they're fine.

 

On a new disc a quick format is fine. A full format will do a deep scan and check the disc for bad sectors and attempt to repair them , where as a quick format will erase all the data only.

 

Actually no... it clears the index. A quick format is the same if you do select all your file & folders, and hit shift+delete (by0passing the recycle bin) in Windows (but without any restrictions or limitations - ie: everything can be deleted without problem including the boot sector)
A full format will make the HDD reset to 0 the whole disk.