I'm fully formatting a second hard drive in my computer and it's a 3tb drive so it's going to take a while. I was wondering if I could watch videos I have on my other drive or if that would cause the process to run less efficiently or even skip sectors it was supposed to check.
Welcome to Seven Forums bcmerr01.
I think you could watch video but it would likely not play well. If I was doing something as important as a drive format, I'd just wait till it was done. :)
As long as you are not running with a single core CPU and have a decent amount of memory, you should be fine, imo.
You will have no problems using your machine while a drive formats. Done it bazillions of times... At least.... Maybe more. :)
It shouldn't take very long to format a drive, even one that large, so I'm thinking it would be a moot point.
There is no real problem in doing something else while you are formatting a drive. At worse, things will seem a little sluggish if you are on a computer with a slow or single processor as even SATA still hits the CPU a little. This will not cause problems with the formatting of the drive, you will just notice sluggishness of your system due to competing resources if you have a low end system.
^^What Keiichi25 said is spot on. There's absolutely no worries to use your computer while a drive formats. Just don't go forgetting about it and restarting the machine. I work on all kinds of machines and do it all the time. Never had a problem.
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