IIRC, the first time I had problems with the low level format was with one of the early IDE controllers and a 230MB Maxtor. Crapped out the entire firmware, was never able to get it to admit who it was again. Seemed to work okay with earlier MFM/RLL 40 MB and 80 MB Conner drives (I think, it's been a while).
AFAIK a lot of IDE drives store part of the firmware on the spinning disk in a special section of the disk. Not sure if those early models used that trick to cut costs or not?
The idea of IDE, as my understanding, is the controller that existed as an ISA card was moved onto the actual drive, and then what became the controller was mostly just extending the ISA bus over to the drive.
My first hard drive was a SCSI-1 ?Fuji? on a Seagate 8-bit ISA card. Families Tandy 1000sx. I remember in the end playing with low level formatting tools and interleves, then the drive dying at the same time. I correlated the two together then, but looking back I think the issue was drive motor/bearings/stuck rotation of platters.
