HDD Formatting

Modern HDDs, such as SAS [27] and SATA[28] drives, appear at their interfaces as a contiguous set of logical blocks; typically 512 bytes long but the industry is in the process of changing to 4,096 byte logical blocks[29]. The process of relating these logical blocks to their physical location on the HDD is called low level formatting which is usually performed at the factory and is not normally changed in the field[30]. High level formatting then writes the file system structures into selected logical blocks to make the remaining logical blocks available to the host OS and its applications[31].