Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
Alan Cox wrote:
On Sat, 16 Feb 2008 19:54:52 -0600
Frank Cox <theatre@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Low level what? If you mean low-level formatting, I don't think
that's been
possible to do with hard drives since the days of RLL and MFM.
Correct (well the very earliest days of IDE), and it wouldn't affect
performance anyway.
I can remember people killing the early IDE drives by low-level
formatting. The tools for low-level formatting MFM/RLL drives would mess
up the IDE drives. With later drives, they would ignore the low-level
formatting attempts.
Themain reason for low-level formatting MFM/RLL drives was moving them
to a new controller, or changing the interleave - nether are applicable
to modern IDE/ATA drives. (It was easier to low-level format then to
tweak the controller data clock to match the old controller.)
The main reason indeed, by going to a different interleave matched to
your usage you could get a big jump in performance (or make it dog
slow). And by playing with large sector sizes you could get a large jump
in capacity. Just as a 3-1/2 floppy can jump from 1440k to 1920k with
large sectors, some hard drives could get a similar boost in capacity,
up to 40%.
I wouldn't try that today with zoned formatting, more CPU in the on-disk
controller, etc, etc. Actually, I would send the LL format command to
the drive if I know what it was, if the controller does it, it would
probably work as well as it did at the factory.
--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot
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