Low level formatting - when, why and how
You will sometimes hear geeks mention this three-word phrase and you might be impressed. The question is, now that your curiosity is piqued, what does it really mean and do you need it? Hopefully, today, I will be able to teach you when you might consider using low level formating, what it is good for and how to safely execute it. Low level formatting is a hard disk operation that should make recovering data from your storage devices impossible once the operation is complete. It sounds like something you might want to do if giving away a hard disk or perhaps discarding an old computer that may have contained useful and important, private information. All right, let's take a closer look and try to figure out how we can go about geeking, safely and smartly. The jargon Low level formatting, as opposed to high level formatting is an operation performed directly against disk sectors. You skip the file system layer and you go directly for the underlying storage. Let me elaborate. ...