Who cares? If you actually worry about security on your disk you are supposed to use DBAN anyways.
[QUOTE=ShaRose_;17095365]Who cares? If you actually worry about security on your disk you are supposed to use DBAN anyways.[/QUOTE]
Some company had a competition to see if anyone could recover data on a hard drive formatted by just zeroing it out, a single pass.
Nobody could.
DBAN is good if you want to be really sure, but if you're selling your PC at a garage sale it's overkill.
-snip-
:saddowns:
[QUOTE=Benjy355;17097098]Nice job looking like a dumbass.
The only difference between Windows' 'Quick' format and the ... not-quick format is checking the HDD for errors.
Quick-Formatting skips this, because it's pretty well useless.
Edit: Only read OP, seeing now that I just kinda popped in here. Why hasn't he replied? D:[/QUOTE]
He's talking about a [b]low-level format[/b], which is completely different than a Windows full format. Nice job looking ten times worse than him.
I thought low-level formats couldn't even be done on modern drives?
[QUOTE=gparent;17097698]He's talking about a [b]low-level format[/b], which is completely different than a Windows full format. Nice job looking ten times worse than him.[/QUOTE]
My bad.
*Attempts to take head out of ass*
No it's not harmful and a [i]real[/i] low-level format has not been possible since the transition from stepper motors to voice coils in hard drives unless Sector Drift is still an issue on hard-sectored medium (which as the name implies is impossible).
Also, excess head movement causing wear on the drive is very miniscule unless your heads are not floating above the platters, in which case either the drive has spin down and the heads are parked or the disk is crashing. A format will not drastically cause no more wear and tear on a hard drive than would a routine defrag.
Geez, there seem to be so many urban myths surrounding hard drives. I miss the 90's when people actually knew shit.
[QUOTE=Roast Beast;17098108]I thought low-level formats couldn't even be done on modern drives?[/QUOTE]We're talking about zeroing the drive, basically.[QUOTE=pentium;17101169]Geez, there seem to be so many urban myths surrounding hard drives. I miss the 90's when people actually knew shit.[/QUOTE]A low-level format causing more wear than a quick format isn't a myth, it's a fact. I'm not saying it's going to significantly reduce the lifespan of your drive.
Hard drive wear and tear is irrelevant in everything, the rate at which harddrives fail from wear-and-tear is extremely low even among servers.
There is absolutely 0 relevant damage from reformatting.
I've formatted one fuck-old 60GB HDD like 50 times and it still works.
-snip-
I just boot into the OS X installer, open the Disk Utility, and use the 7-pass format option.
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