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With trim/unmap enabled (default setting in Windows Server), significant wait time (just under two minutes) occurs when formatting a PowerStore volume that is more than 1 TB. The larger the volume is, the longer the format wait time is, which is a common situation with external storage. This case applies to volumes formatted as NTFS or ReFS.
To avoid a long format wait time when mapping and formatting a large volume, temporarily disable trim/unmap. This setting is disabled using the fsutil command from a command prompt with administrator privileges.
Figure 1 shows the commands to query the state and to disable trim/unmap for NTFS and ReFS volumes on a host. A DisableDeleteNotify value of 1 means that trim/unmap is disabled, and long format wait times are avoided when performing a quick format.
Changing the state of DisableDeleteNotify does not require a host reboot to take effect.
Figure 1. Use the fsutil command to query or change the state of trim/unmap
Once the volume is formatted, reenable trim/unmap so the host can take advantage of deleted space reclamation for NTFS volumes.
For more background information about trim/unmap with PowerStore, see the Dell PowerStore: Microsoft Hyper-V Best Practices white paper.