On Thu, 28 Sep 2017, Chuck Guzis wrote:
"Low level format" is pretty much a relic of the old non-servo MFM drives. I recall that early Maxtor IDE drives implemented a LLF
Lowlevel formatting has to be done for *all* ST-506 interface drives (e.g. "MFM" and "RLL" drives). It is the disk controller that needs to write its sector and track layout to the drive (ID marks, data marks, GAPs, CRC, ECC and so on). This is also true for SMD drives, for example. So it didn't make much sense in selling preformatted drives until when disk drives exposed only the disk blocks to the host. Whether a drives uses servo information or not is irrelevant. I don't consider writing servo information as lowlevel formatting.
Christian
