Low level formatting never referred to wiping out logical sectors on a drive. Low level formatting always referred to reinitializing whole tracks. In the old days, software took care of this during formatting. As drive technology changed, the drives came with tracks already preformatted. In fact, a "long" format under Windows really just became a process of reading every sector on the pre-formatted disk to make sure it was readable and marking it bad if it couldn't be (underlying drive electronics might do other things such as remapping, though). Drive manufacturers got tired of trying to fit things into the track/head/sector model (well, cylinder/head/sector if you want to get technical) for addressing absolute sectors and went to logical blocks. And remappings. And all kinds of hokery. The bottom line on that is each drive needed special tools to do a real low level format (rewriting whole tracks, not just logical sector data).
What you refer to as writing zeroes to a whole drive has always been called wiping the drive as far as I know.
I'm not into nitpicking people to death over mostly harmless semantic mistakes, but there really is a difference between a low level format and a wipe. The low level format is completely irrespective of operating system and file system (NTFS, FAT, UFS, ZFS, etc.). Your wipe process (writing zeroes) will just delete all the sector level information from the drive, not the low level information. Master Boot Records, Partition Tables, directories, ... all these are logical constructs laid over lower level tracks.
The wipe does at least two things:
1) removes all identifying information from the logical sectors (but not things stored in the controller or track/sector headers).
2) refreshes the magnetic signal of all sectors.
A low level format adds the benefit of refreshing all the track and sector header information that normally isn't visible, but can also fade (it's all magnetic). I don't have the time to look it up right now, but let's just say a track looks like this logically:
As I said, that's a quick summary from memory (it's been many years since I dealt with this at a low level). It's not exact, but should make the point. NOTE: "Advanced Format" drives literally created fewer sectors on each track by making each sector 4096 bytes instead of 512 bytes, which obviously required less header information, giving more space to data. Anyway, a wipe ONLY accesses the SECTOR*_DATA area.
What you refer to as writing zeroes to a whole drive has always been called wiping the drive as far as I know.
I'm not into nitpicking people to death over mostly harmless semantic mistakes, but there really is a difference between a low level format and a wipe. The low level format is completely irrespective of operating system and file system (NTFS, FAT, UFS, ZFS, etc.). Your wipe process (writing zeroes) will just delete all the sector level information from the drive, not the low level information. Master Boot Records, Partition Tables, directories, ... all these are logical constructs laid over lower level tracks.
The wipe does at least two things:
1) removes all identifying information from the logical sectors (but not things stored in the controller or track/sector headers).
2) refreshes the magnetic signal of all sectors.
A low level format adds the benefit of refreshing all the track and sector header information that normally isn't visible, but can also fade (it's all magnetic). I don't have the time to look it up right now, but let's just say a track looks like this logically:
Code:
[TRACK1_HEADER] [SECTOR1_HEADER] [SECTOR1_DATA (512 bytes)] [SECTOR2_HEADER] [SECTOR2_DATA (512 bytes)] : [SECTORn_HEADER] [SECTORn_DATA (512 bytes)]
As I said, that's a quick summary from memory (it's been many years since I dealt with this at a low level). It's not exact, but should make the point. NOTE: "Advanced Format" drives literally created fewer sectors on each track by making each sector 4096 bytes instead of 512 bytes, which obviously required less header information, giving more space to data. Anyway, a wipe ONLY accesses the SECTOR*_DATA area.