its likely that multi TB hard drives will be driven by much faster controllers. remember that PC technology evolves together, faster processors, faster memory at greater capacites, faster ATA standards, faster controllers, etc, etc...
If you could make an 8 GB hard drive work with some ancient 286 you would see that it would take an age to do a full format.
If you are using FAT32 partitions over 32 GB start to become troublesome. I would be splitting that 120 GB up into 32 GB chunks and certainly not partitioning it as all one thing if you are using FAT32. It will be hard to manage and the cluster sizes shall be silly big.
If you are using NTFS it is a different matter and I am sure that you will find this file system much better with partitions over 32 GB.
The largest partition on my system is 80 GB and its NTFS (its a stripe set.) If I had wanted FAT32 I would have divided it up into several partitions.
Remember as well that in Windows 2000 one can quick format, even on a newly created partition so it doesn't have to take a really long time, even to format large partitions like 120 GB.