What Does Formatting Actually Do, Anyway?

[@ThioJoe]

I didn’t get a new camera, actually just got some new lights, improved the lighting arrangement, and messed around with some camera settings. And of course cranked up the sharpen effect in premiere pro ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[@Hopiskyc]

What lighting can do

[@MandolinSashaank]

Nice

[@Everytwo_]

Yeah i saw that...

[@TheOnlyK1ng]

Where is the member emoji???????

[@alpanamhashilkar960]

this is epik

[@richardeadon6396]

"Have you ever wondered what _actually_ is going on" YES! ABOUT EVERYTHING! KEEP MAKING THESE VIDEOS!

[@DarkyBoy]

I agree

[@sandeepbhuiya4624]

@Omri Hermon manufacturers are still making a computer

[@Adrien_broner]

How come every time you format you lose more and more total disc space

[@DarkyBoy]

@@Adrien_broner what do you mean?

[@tylerdurden788]

One of my friends is always amused at my random knowledge.

[@DavesGarage]

Hi Joe! You might remember me as the author of Task Manager, but I'm also the author of the Format dialog! I have a video about it's history on my channel (Dave's Garage). Would have been a good topic to do a collab on! Cheers and the new Apature lights (I can only assume), looks good!

[@tomasruiz06]

I come from that video!

[@shreejal]

Why aren't you verified

[@Anonymous-cm8jy]

God bless you sir.

[@RealTagComputing]

LOL

[@PeterMaddison2483]

@@Anonymous-cm8jy He IS GOD, he can bless himself :-)

[@PhilLesh69]

Sector size is a function of read/write head size. Block size can affect read/write speeds. In other words, it's faster to read ten 10 byte blocks than it is to read one hundred 1 byte blocks.

[@mateiberatco500]

Head size has nothing to do with sector size. Heads fly over 1 bit at a time (it's size is related to bit density only). The higher-level electronics (microcontroller) divide those bits into logical sector sizes. For each "sector", it also has to store headers (which are factory written, mentioned in video) and ECC data (error checking and correction); which all take space. Raising sector size from 512 to 4K means eliminating ECC and headers of 3 sectors, while slightly increasing ECC data for the 4th. But creates compatibility problems (mainly slowing down) with partitioning of old SW (up to, including, XP). PS: those 3.5" 1.44MB (1440MB) floppies were also advertised as 2MB unformatted. Wikipedia mentions formatted size for Amiga as 1.760KB.

[@michaelhawthorne8696]

That would be the reason why the file transfer dialogue box drops in Bytes per second when you are transfering multiple folders rather that videos, becuase the folders may have a lot of small files that don't fill the allocted units size but videos would.

[@Anonymous-cm8jy]

What's the ideal sector size?

[@luhgarlicbread]

@@Anonymous-cm8jy Depends on the use case, hopefully someone can provide some more insight on this as I’m not really sure

[@1tgb4yb25ub5ub]

​@Anonymous-cm8jy if your doing mostly bug files like games use big if its mostly small stuff use small

[@chhailbihariposwal]

Please never stop making these informative videos.

[@Hope_Upstairs]

thiozombie

[@gregdowle8031]

If he could talk a fraction slower it would be fantastic. Not a criticism, just a suggestion.

[@chhailbihariposwal]

@@gregdowle8031 you are somewhat right.

[@rmclean3]

Not sure about everyone else but I really appreciate the extra details you provide in your videos. Thanks for not "dumbing it down" too much!

[@Raverspike]

Drink every time he says „I’m not gonna get into that“

[@LiveeviL6969]

And double for "actually" and "basically".

[@SparkieUwU]

@@LiveeviL6969 I don't have a deathwish, thanks

[@DigitalHandle]

I have drank 20 beers so far

[@reycko102]

Got the notification while formating a 30Gigs drive.

[@marysridhar_nvc4975]

LoL

[@Evanfr14]

XD

[@daringcuteseal]

Lol 5

[@shreejal]

Lol

[@reycko102]

@@daringcuteseal Lol 6

[@earlt911]

A trim command (known as TRIM in the ATA command set, and UNMAP in the SCSI command set) allows an operating system to inform a solid-state drive (SSD) which blocks of data are no longer considered in use and can be wiped internally. Trim was introduced soon after SSDs were introduced.

[@jayrabbitgamingproductions7335]

Perfect timing! I’m actually in the middle of formatting a 2tb drive to clean it of things I regret seeing

[@JordanViknar]

@@Hope_Upstairs ?

[@electronichaircut8801]

Porn

[@pythondrink]

@@electronichaircut8801 😂😂😂

[@gregdowle8031]

Has it completed yet?

[@Mamu-m6x]

Bruh

[@bbbl67]

Yes, I've been using IBM PC's since the 80's, at that time the original hard drive controllers actually sat in a plug-in card attached to the original ISA bus (great-grandfather of all of the current generation of PCI buses). The control logic sat outside the hard drives themselves on this plug-in card. Now back then there used to be two different types of hard drive formats available, MFM & RLL, and so you had to get the appropriate type of controller card for the type of HDD you were getting. The low-level formatter was a piece of code within the controller card that you could execute by using a special program in DOS that initiated that portion of the controller's logic. That all went away once the IDE HDD's came, the controller logic all lay inside the HDD's themselves, and the smart "controller cards" actually just became simpler dumb interface cards. Low-level formatting also became inaccessible by that point, as the LLF was done at the factory, and never needed refreshing.

[@DunnsDayDash]

*finally finds a video where someone goes into detail about something no one ever goes into detail about so I can finally learn 100%* KZbinr: I’m not going to get into that, I’m going to keep it simple for this video GOD DAMMIT 😫

[@deadchannel5933]

I swear I had a stroke reading your comment

[@chris2746]

This is a pretty good piece, I was already familiar with a lot of the stuff in isolation but you did a nice job putting it all together into an easily understandable package.

[@HamzaWoo]

This is why i subbed to this channel Some stuff u wonder what they do

[@alexandermeneses5688]

I would love to know more about SSDs! You left us a bit short on them :D

[@likebot.]

LL formatting was back in the day when a 10 megabyte drive was _something..._ back when most personal computers ran on floppys or tape and the user was the device driver for everything.

[@jamesslick4790]

"..........the user was the device driver for everything." 🤔😳😁👍😊👍

[@TitanTubs]

Bro you need to like assemble the stuff into like a playlist teach everything about computers because you explain everything so well. You're literally a villain turned hero. Thank you so much for what you do

[@srsykes]

I had almost forgotten about low-level formatting. Seems that it took forever to low-level format my 30MB hard disk. I had the option to upgrade my Compaq 286 to the 30MB and all my friends thought I was nuts for paying extra for such a huge drive. "You will never be able to use 30MB on a home computer even 30 or 40 years from now."

[@overnightdelivery]

Wow lol. I remember when I had the MASSIVE 40MB Hard Drive installed in a Tandy 1000. Crazy to think that only about 25 1.44 MB Floppy disks would fill the entire drive. Yet that was considered more than enough space at the time.

[@MikeSmith-fe3ng]

This was the fastest, easiest 16 min video I've watched. Thank you.

[@chriss3154]

I'm addicted to these videos! Very well explained👍

[@asariqueen5737]

The way you've completey turned the channel around is beautiful.

[@louaiefellouh]

First time I watch one of ThioJoe's videos in the first 10 minutes.

[@maxtornogood]

Before Vista a "full" format was just a deep scan over the drive for bad sectors & not actually writing zeros. Starting with Vista a full format does do the zero write.

[@MickeyMousePark]

back in the day there use to be format without erase command..this would read a sector then format that sector the re-write the data back into that sector..this took hours to do but was helpful in recovering drives that were starting to have issues

[@ian_silent]

Very interesting and informative! Thanks!

[@oscargalvez7]

Superb explanation, thanks!

[@happyron]

ThioJoe reminds me of myself when I was younger - except he's really cool and has a youtube channel.

[@G0lden07]

I'm surprised you explained all that shit and didn't bother with what NTFS and FAT32 are XD

[@csdgay]

english vs spanish

[@ApofKol]

Oh right, I totally forgot, I was kinda looking forward that part... :C

[@EduardoEscarez]

​@DEEJMASTER 333 🤣🤣

[@mikechappell4156]

He only covered NTFS for format/quick format. A FAT filesystem doesn't require those particular files.

[@electronichaircut8801]

@DEEJMASTER 333 exFAT

[@jasonlight1670]

As a tech guy who helps people with their computer and is constantly into tech stuff, I was always curious about this and even though you said you went extra, always remember there are people out there who understand everything you said and I learned a lot from the video! Thanks for the education and I always love your content. 🤘🏼🤙🏼

[@Khsubrina]

Your Videos are very good and helped many people including me. Keep up the good work!

[@jimi7053]

Dude these videos are so informativ! I don't know any other channel that has tech content that is so unique as this one. Most channels just have the standard top 10 best gaming laptops or something. Not ThioJoe, this video and the System32 hidden programs video are so unique and high quality. The reason I am subscribed to your channel! Keep up the good work man!

[@stephensnell1379]

You mean informative

[@stevenadams9915]

Nice one, u bring to this platform a genuine approach sharing ur knowledge with others and create a supportive community. So long as u tell it as it is I'll continue to tune in.YES from me too

[@DissiOfficial]

I learn a lot on this channel please keep these videos coming.

[@thesun___]

This video was better than I thought it would be. Thank you.

[@MrBrianms]

Thanks for the explanation of hard disc and SSD style storage. The MVME on both the motherboard and on the SSD looks like a better strategy. brilliant.

[@nolancollet3458]

The detailed info about the drives makes the video very educational but still intresting. Keep it up! :)

[@gm2407]

@15:25 I would like a video on the NVME drive please regarding that specific process. I think it would be informative and interesting to the audience.

[@mohammadumair3108]

I had been looking for this video since ages. Very informative! Thanks 👍☺️

[@erik1836]

THIO you are amazing! Thank you, for your incredibly informative tutorials.

[@burtonschrader2]

Thanks very very much. Now I understand. You present these subjects in a way that my poor old brain absorbs what you are teaching. Thanks.

[@Yakone]

Very educational! And surprisingly clearly explained! I'll be checking out more of your videos. Thanks!

[@ShoFox]

I love these videos so much.. Simply explained for everyone!

[@aaroneidinger]

Back in the day, low-level formatting wasn't just an "apparently you could" thing. It was a "you must do this first" thing. My memory is fading a bit, but in MS-DOS, you had to run the DEBUG command (built-in to the OS) to access a piece of microcode to do the low-level format. The code was likely on the controller. Once running, you would put in the drive geometry which was printing on the drive from the factory. It said how many heads, cylinders, sectors, etc. there were on the drive. In addition to that, the drive often came with a defect map you had to key into the low-level formatting utility to remove those parts of the drive from visibility from the operating system. Isn't that something, a drive coming from the factory with known defects you had to work around. I don't miss those days. Once IDE drives came around, the controller was on the drive itself and the computer had a "host bus adapter" to be able to connect to them. I remember back in the day wondering why I'd want all these things integrated on the motherboard. What if one component fails? I'd need to replace the whole board! That's expensive and inconvenient! Now, it's not a big deal. The reliability of components is really good at this point with all the mistakes being made decades ago and manufacturers learning from them. With the advent of IDE drives, Zone Bit Recording became a thing so your drive geometry changed from a physical feature to a logical one. When the operating system asks for some data on this (cylinder, head, sector), the drive knows where it actually is and reports it back. Most spinning drives today have only one physical platter with one or two heads. Not like back in the day when it was common to have a drive with many platters and two heads each. My first hard drive was a MFM, 5.25", full-height (3") drive holding 30MB. I would next upgrade to a RLL, 3.25", half-height (1.5") drive holding 40MB which just happened to be a slower drive than the first one.

[@Expressoblood]

It's nice when a KZbinr explains somewhat complex technical stuff in terms I can understand. Though with "zone allocation" it might be irrelevant but, I am curious how big is "Big files"( like, "text document big", "mp3 big" "Cd Iso" big, "DVD iso" big or such. )

[@damnit00000001]

That's the clearest explanation I've ever heard

[@PabSungenis]

Interesting thing: floppies and hard drives also have a sort of translation layer. It’s called sector skew. Sectors are not laid out in numeric order but so that, ideally, the next sector to be read is directly under the head when the previous action is done. This is set during low level formatting.

[@luhgarlicbread]

Do you know if it was possible to low level format a floppy disk outside of the factory?

[@PabSungenis]

@@luhgarlicbread All floppies were low level formatted by the user. That's why you could select the different capacity for your needs based on your hardware.

[@luhgarlicbread]

@@PabSungenis Oh, cool

[@stanleymakafui]

Very informative. I enjoyed it, however, the part that got me more glued was where you stopped. I'm using more SSDs now to create content and I was interested in the Open Channel SSD thing about NVME drives.

[@puspamadak]

Just stumbled upon your channel and I started to get all the answers to my questions!

[@istiaquemahmood7266]

You made every single second of this video worth . You constantly do on all of your videos though tbh . Cheers mate 👍

[@xenorac]

This has answered a lot of questions about hard drives I really have I wondered about for a long long time!

[@bb55555555]

Good video Joe. An excellent crash course on how drives work.

[@AntekCookie]

dude your videos are awesome, i honestly didnt knew about metadata files on disk

[@lisalasoya2898]

If I were wearing a hat it would acknowledge the fact that this short is awesome. My disc are cleaner when I format them and it takes more bytes which is what I aim for. Thank you for sharing.

[@quest4439]

This man's explanations are all over the place. Reminds me of how a child would explain things. No structure, no pacing or pauses, and lots of 'I'm not going to get into that'.

[@angiecostabr]

Wonderfully technical! Thank you so much!

[@pablogriswold421]

Okay this video was more useful than the classic "how to change the oil in your computer" from back in the day. Thank you very much.

[@marcse7en]

If I had a dollar for every time ThioJoe said: "I'm not gonna get into that," I'd have enough money to buy an SSD! 👍😂

[@user-zs8eg4mu8t]

Three

[@marcse7en]

@@user-zs8eg4mu8t Would you care to elucidate on your one word reply? ... Three SSD's?

[@user-zs8eg4mu8t]

@@marcse7en ssds

[@w6dm]

1 rtx 3090

[@hamzarotimi4082]

Thanks a lot for the knowledge you have been impacting into us.😌

[@Tubeytime]

"impacting into us"

[@Mike0193Azul]

Very helpful information and indepth thank you

[@ramprasath219]

Now I know what is the meaning of: *Size of actual file and size of file in the disk* while seeing properties of a file or folder😎

[@Custmzir]

@@shadycopilot Aww man

[@mohamedshaim5959]

@@Custmzir so we back in the mine

[@laurendoe168]

Some (if not many) Defrag programs will show the existence of the metadata files. Some will even display a name for each of them.

[@phs125]

Yea, I remember seeing $MFT and thinking why I can't move it somewhere else...

[@gregdowle8031]

@@phs125 I've seen that as well.

[@phs125]

For future reference, If you get swapfile.sys or pagefile.sys And need to move it to make partitions, Just disable paging, reboot, and defrag...

[@juliancarter557]

The way I recall "Low level formatting" was in the pre ATA interface days. The PC (usually DOS based Disk File System) actually completely controlled the hard disk. This also only allowed for logical drives of 32MB (yes MB). The Hard Disk Controller was plugged into an expansion slot on your computer and then you would use the dos debug tool to access a certain memory address to invoke the setup tools to partition and low level format your drives then allocate them as logical drives. I dont recall ever having to re low level format a drive on a PC XT or AT you merely set up the drive tracks, sectors and partitions once. Then you could return to DOS and format the drives. The ATA drives introduced the actual hardware control to the drives themselves and a simplified interface for the computers. So while you may use the DOS/Windows format command afterwards what physically happened on the disk was out of the computers hands as the ATA on drive controller actually took control and allowed for automatic management of bad sectors by swappibg bad sectors with a reserve of alternative sectors.

[@rafiurislam27]

You are the best Tech KZbinr 💚❤️💚

[@dave_n8pu]

Thanks for adding the time stamp.

[@memorygood2091]

I think you forgot to mention one very important thing about non-quick formatting, that is it will check which cells/sectors are bad when writing 0's to them, then it will mark them and isolate them in order to prevent the OS from using them.

[@ncg8224]

Thiojoe went from a troll to creating actual education videos. Times have really changed

[@kblam1001]

Thank you for making this video. I learned a lot. And also I am now motivated to format one of my drives 😄

[@helloitsmatt]

Computer Master who saved my computer's life🔥🔥

[@helloitsmatt]

Omg the computer Master 😍 tysm🥺

[@wot_hog]

Very interesting, especially the bit about choosing big blocks (7:40) for big files, but you forgot to tell us the important stuff, like how/why to choose FAT formatting, or FAT32, or NTFS, or exFAT, whatever all those are. Now THAT info seems more useful than knowing about sectors and cells and pages and whatnot.

[@johnhillis1292]

Now show us how to Unformat a Quick format! Keep up the good work ThioJoe. I am a long time fan!

[@mohamededrees979]

Provisional explaining good work thanks

[@mikegallegos7]

I remember LL Formatting (LLF) and that the reading arm mechanism was large and had density. That also meant the seek time was longer due to the read arm weight and that, speed, would wear out the reader arm. Thus, drives would fail and computer speed was limited from sluggish to not very fast. Therefore, when LLF became strictly a manufacturing process, reader arms became lighter, could move faster, reduced seek time, and thus computers got a speed boost.

[@WaterlessIce]

This helps so much! I want to get an SSD and want to know what to do with the old hard drive, and now I know

[@arshdeepsinghsoni13469]

Love the way you explain

[@CS.319]

That was some knowledge in this video!💯

[@jethrowbowdeen]

Awesome job explaining out things in detail for better understanding for all types of mind sets. You calling must have been a teacher or guide for others. Technical thinking is extremely important and very hard to find, especially these days. Never loose that moral spark you carry big dog. I definitely learned a lot from your channel and that's what it's about. GREAT JOB 👍

[@kennystrawnmusic]

Found this video a bit late but one thing that should be noted about SSDs is that they’re organized in pretty much the exact same way that RAM also is these days. Just as SSDs are organized into pages, so too is RAM and most modern CPUs have recursive page tables to map memory addresses the same way that an SSD’s mapping table is able to translate virtual LBAs to physical addresses of SSD pages. Since operating systems always have to design their own heap allocators to map the RAM, it should go without saying that mapping an SSD should in theory be just as straightforward. I say this as someone who has studied both the OSDev Wiki and Philipp Oppermann’s tutorial on writing kernels from scratch extensively.

[@DavidSmith-mx7ll]

Really great information Joe. Esp. on SSD

[@wp5355]

Excellent presentation!!

[@chromerims]

Thank you for this quality video.

[@Dragon-yv3wt]

Great explanation!👍

[@maleeshapriyanjana7604]

What a great explanation!

[@Wraith_of_Wrath]

Nice informative video, I now have a better understanding of how and what my drives do … thanks 👍

[@TimberTinker]

Absolutely wonderful🙌I love the fun facts😂

[@syedirfanahmad9626]

Hello TJ, it is a very good, informative video 👍

[@edwardjaime8363]

Great explanation Thanks

[@Isopxl]

This is a very informative video, thanks so much!

[@lorrewatkins5925]

I learn a lot from U TJ So I just wanted to thank U ! and keep up the good vid's !

[@Shermanbay]

Another way of looking at low-level formatting is that the original write head is positioned by physical location, then it writes the address that defines the location. Simply put, at the location for track 1, sector 1, it writes "track 1, sector 1" , then "track 1, sector 2", then "track1, sector3", etc. The higher-level software of the OS then relies less on the physical head position and more on the written data to confirm its position just before reading or writing subsequent data. If it didn't do it this way, it would be all to easy to make a positioning mistake and store data in the wrong place, overwriting something else.

[@CPC4CPC5MCMTCMECMACM]

is it same for SSD drives like sandisk 2tb ? Is is possible to recover ?

[@BookOfMorman]

Sweet, great video! Thanks!

[@tommyvictorbuch6960]

Fascinating information. Good to know.

[@AliXDream9]

Thank you for all this information

[@johnobarake]

Useful info thank you

[@saumytiwari7]

You are the best... Thankyou so much.. Thanks a lot...

[@captainmorgan5255]

Nice video: thanks for the help !!!

[@typograf62]

Ah, those days when every floppy disk had to be formatted before it could be used. And then came pre-formatted floppies. And Norton Utilities had a Disk Editor that could recover a deleted file - mostly manually. Something really got better.

[@vlogtypea3201]

Good explanation!

[@cursoreu2605]

Great video, I never knew what quick format does...

[@nofal6]

No wonder y this man has 2.64mil damn u a goat homi❤️

[@RevNicholasJonsson]

Thank you for a very informative and helpful video 😊