Low-level formatting formats your hard drive past the point of no return because it wipes all existing sectors on the physical surface of your drive rather than just on the filesystem. But there is a big difference between that and low-level formatting (LLF) which wipes your hard drive on a deeper level, making old data extremely difficult to recover because it formats the physical sectors on the hard drive itself.Īn important thing to know is that the meaning of “low-level formatting” has changed over time, and this efficient formatting method has largely been replaced today by something known as “zero-filling.” Here’s everything you need to know about this process and the tools you need to do it. Pretty much all of you will know about hard disk formatting, and we’d hazard a guess that many of you have done a bit of formatting yourselves.
