on 8/31/04 9:38 PM, David at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
How long should a low level format of a 160 Gig hard ATA Seagate drive take? My 6500 has been at it for 13 hours. The drive is suspect.
Thanks, DavidJust short of forever. I've been curious about the relevant factors in the speed of the low level/zero data process. I've suspected that it is a combination of processor speed and available ram, but have no basis for that suspicion. I hope that someone who is knowledgeable will go into an in depth discussion of the nuts and bolts of the process. I also suspect that doing a low level formatting of an IDE drive may be contra-indicated.
The only time a LL format is called for is when a large number of blocks (> 1%) have gone bad and been re-mapped. However, this is sometimes simply an early indication the drive is heading for total failure. With todays cheap high density drives, it is simply not worth most peoples time to fool around with this stuff. Also, a lot of the learned and passed on knowledge on LL formats is based on 2 and 3 generation old designs that stored < 6 GB and cost more than a low end computer does today. With the cost of the drives involved back then, it was worth it for people to try and recover the drives when they had problems. Finally, I don't know of a current utility on the Macintosh that supports accessing the drives at that level, they only exist on PCs and in my opinion they need to go the way of the serial mouse, parallel port and PS 2 keyboard port.
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