on 10/27/99 3:00 PM, Marc Sira enunciated:
> I'm always interested by the tendency of Mac users to reformat and
> reinitialise hard drives whenever there's a problem, or in this case as a
> prophylactic. For the record, there's no way to actually low-level format
> an IDE drive like the one in the 3400 (or 2400, or 2300). All you'll be
> doing is writing zeros to the disk, which isn't going to buy you much but a
> sort of hospital sense of cleanliness and a way to work the disk for an
> hour or so. SCSI disks can be truly low-level formatted (the drive itself
> knows how to do this), but (a) it takes forever, and (b) you shouldn't be
> doing it all that often.
Marc is extremely correct, and I misspoke. It is jargon in my office to say
"Low level that sucker" when we only mean "Initialize". Rarely do we
actually select "Low level" or "write zeros" in Drive Setup's options
screen. Thanks for the catch, Marc. It was my mistake to transfer the
catch-phrase of my office (Macintosh technical support for Motorola's
in-house IT dept., where Macs are not-so-slowly being replaced by Dell
machines running NT4.0) into an environment (this list) where the
catch-phrase is not used.
I didn't know about the folly of low-level initialization of IDE drives,
either. Thanks.
Sorry again,
---
- Scott Auld, Macintosh Support
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