![]() I see no evidence that this program is doing anything other than I/O accesses to a storage controller, and it absolutely doesn’t have access to the storage controller’s onboard (proprietary) firmware that would be necessary to write calibration tables/head gains/thermal coefficients/etc to do anything even remotely resembling a true low-level format if that’s even possible at all on a modern spinning disk. The first time that a low-level format (“LLF”) is performed on a hard disk, the disk’s platters start out empty. I just don’t like that a tool advertises a basic zero-write like this, which is something that a lot of other software like HxD will do but also a lot more (DoD santize by writing 0x55, 0xAA, then random bytes and then zero to all blocks), etc. I guess it’s just a vocabulary thing and “Low level format” has lost its original meaning to obsolescence. The same went for floppy disks - if the heads on your floppy drive were out of alignment, your drive wouldn’t be able to read disks written on other drives until you did a format on them which physically moves the cylinders, and then those disks would work on your drive but not someone else’s. ![]() The last drive I know of that a user was able to low-level format was an old Quantum IDE drive, I think it was 10GB, and it also regenerated a whole pile of head calibration tables for each platter that were written to some kind of nonvolatile memory on the drive somewhere. Low level formatting physically locates the cylinders/sectors on a drive’s platters… on old MFM/RLL drives you had to do this to your new drive because the temperature/etc changes between the factory and your house would cause the platters to expand and cylinders to go out of alignment until you ran the manufacturer’s LLF firmware (usually at C800:5 or CC00:5 in the controller). Yeah, the firmware on some enterprise drives can map between 512B and 520B sectors, that’s a layer of abstraction above any low level formatting. Maybe some of them load this firmware on the drive, but I haven’t seen any proprietary tools leaked/released that can access it. ![]() Sure, but this isn’t what a low level format is, and there are no other utilities that can do a low level format on a modern drive except for the manufacturer’s factory test/diagnostic software. ![]() Similar to other utils that also low level format drives Is this a program that just does a zero-fill of a storage device and calls it low-level formatting? You don’t LLF a piece of flash storage, at least by the definition I’m familiar with… that’s just fundamentally not how it works. Since all the intelligence in an MFM/RLL drive is in the controller card itself and not the disk assembly itself, it was up to the manufacturer to provide a BIOS utility (usually at C800:5, hence the DEBUG > g=C800:5 command) that would physically realign the tracks/sectors/cylinders on each platter and you’d get a clickclickclickclickBEEPBEEP-THWACKclickclicklcick for about two hours as it scanned across every single cylinder and indexed bad sectors that failed.īut now I see a piece of modern software claiming to do a ‘low-level format’ on modern drives over an interface and firmware that I would almost guarantee is several levels of abstraction higher than actually exposing a low-level format of the physical media. ![]() Now, I’ve worked with hardware the whole way back to the Motorola 680 at the lowest level, and have actually low-level formatted the half dozen MFM and RLL drives I own. ![]()
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