Blank (virgin) HDD's; are any preformatted?

I have always been under the impression new hard drives (not SSD's) are not formatted. Low level, yes, but not for ant file system (FAT32, NTFS, ext2, ext3 etc.) It was up to the user to prepare the drive.

I got into a discussion with an "engineer" from a small CE manufacture regarding DVR's and he is/was under the impression new drives were already formatted. I explained how could be since there isn't any way the manufacture would/could know how/where the drive was going to be used.

I did a little searching and came across this article;
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-format-a-new-internal-hard-drive/

and this statement;

Most new external hard drives available in the market are designed to be plug and play. By plug and play, what I mean is that you can just plug in the hard drive and start using it right away. This is because the manufacturers send the disk initialised and ready to work with the most common operating systems.
The internal hard disks available in the market, on the other hand, require to be prepared before use.

Click to expand...

"External" hard drives?? The only t
"external" thing I know is an external enclosure.

Am I missing something here?? Has something changed in the past five or so years??

Google external harddrive

but essitially an external hard drive is a internal hardrive in an enclosure (I think the enclosure converts SATA to USB) than you can plug in to your computer and use for backups or data storage. Most use USB or firewire connections so they are able to be plugged in and ready to go right there with no partitioning/formatting needed on the user side. Albeit a bit slow in the transfer rate, they are great things to have if you say want to load important docs, pictures, receipts, etc. to put in a safety deposit box or something.

but yes, Internal drive are RAW drives.

but essitially an external hard drive is a internal hardrive in an enclosure

Click to expand...

But, that isn't what the phase says.

Confusing and just inaccurate. But then again, it's the CEA.

fall said:

but essitially an external hard drive is a internal hardrive in an enclosure

Click to expand...

Please don't abuse the terms "internal" and "external" with relation to the drive. The terms say nothing about the drive itself. They only designate its placement relative to the primary system case.

That hits the nail on the head. Abusing those terms w/o the word enclosure included.