Hi all!
On my current drives - Sony DW-22A (Lite-On SOHW 1633) and Sony GW-121A format take about 15-20min.! LED turned off during formatting.
I have writte plenty of disks and dozens of DVD+RW's on Sony and LG GSA-4163B drives using mkisofs + cdrecord or BURNCDCC and never didn't care about "formatting". And never got error on writing or further reading of this disks.
So I think that time consuming "formatting" procedure is simply useless. Especially mysterious "background" stage which uses 95% of total formatting time and doubles-triples total disk writing time (12min. at 4x).
