On Wed, 9 Jul 1997 08:13:54 -0500,
"Daniel R. Killoran,Ph.D." <drk@shore.net> wrote:
> >I believe I remember reading somewhere that IDE drives, used in PCs, can't
> >be low-level formatted, and that the online drive manuals, being generic
> >ones for both Quantum's SCSI and IDE drives, don't make that distinction.
> >I'm not certain of that, though, by any means.  Anybody?

Whether (E)IDE or SCSI, for most today's zone-recording drives,
low-level formatting at user's site doesn't make any sense.  Why?
Because there's no way for formatters (in PC BIOS or Mac disk
partitioning software) to tell the REAL geometry of the drive.
Instead, these drives report a FAKE geometry.  You can sometimes even
set up arbitrary geometry parameters of your choice.

So, though your software may have "low-level format" command or
option, the drives usually don't do real low-level format.  They just
pretend to be doing it but actually do something else.

> If it were an IDE drive, the SCSI bus wouldn't see it! (More likely, it
> would burn out the SCSI chip!)

Urm, to burn the chip or the drive, you first have to connect the
40-pin IDE drive to the 50-conductor SCSI bus...

Ken