Formatting is useless unless there are bad sectors

[uweseimet]

In the feedback I receive from users I have noticed that they sometimes format their drives or media before partitioning. Unless there are bad sectors, formatting is a waste of time. Formatting emulated drives, e.g. when using SCSI2Pi, BlueSCSI or Hatari, also does not make sense. Formatting is only required in order to let the drive replace bad sectors by spare sectors, or if you want to change the physical sector size. The latter is only supported by a small number of SCSI drives.
It is irrelevant whether or not a drive has previously been used with a different platform: On the Atari, partitioning before the first use is all you need.

Note that modern SATA drives do not even support formatting anymore.