Re: [SLE] Polish That Disk

Many hard drives grow errors with use. The low-level format generally finds these "bad spots" and adds them to the "so called" grown defect list. This makes the space unseen by the higher-level reads/writes.

Actually, to be strictly accurate, different disks do different things on a low level format. Some do nothing more than wipe the partition table and other important areas of the surface. Many will do a write of zeros across all sectors, some will do a write-verify, and some will do a write-read. Some will build defect tables as you mention, some will actually do bad sector reassigns there and then. It depends on the disk. -- 2:15pm up 3 days, 5:54, 1 user, load average: 0.15, 0.03, 0.01