▷ Hdd low level format: what is it and how to use it?

Almost all of our regular readers will know about formatting the hard drive, and we would risk assuming that many of them have formatted on occasion. But what a lot of people don't know is that there is also Low Level Format (LLF) that erases the hard drive at a deeper level, making old data extremely difficult to recover. HDD Low Level Format is a great tool that will help us to do low level formatting of our hard drives.

What is low-level formatting

An important thing to know is that the meaning of low-level formatting has changed over time, and this efficient formatting method has been largely replaced today by something known as "zero fill. " Here you will find everything you need to know about this process and the tools you need to do it.

We recommend reading our article on How to format a hard drive

Low-level formatting formats the hard disk beyond the point of no return, because it erases all existing sectors on the physical surface of the disk rather than just the file system. It was used in the past to get rid of all existing data on hard drives permanently. This formatting is very useful if you have confidential data that you want to be gone forever, either because you want to sell the hard drive, or because it has a serious virus that cannot be removed by the standard formatting process.

This is a big difference from standard formatting, which only marks the data as deleted in the file system, even if it was not actually removed from the surface of the hard drive. This means that this data can be recovered, and many times in a really simple way. You don't want to take this risk if you are going to sell your hard drives.

Today, modern hard drives (SATA and ATA) are low in format at the time of manufacture and technically cannot be low-level reformatted in the same way as older hard drives. However, there are equivalent processes that perform similar functions. The modern equivalent of the low-level format is " zero fill ", whereby it replaces all the data on your hard drive with arbitrary zeros or other characters, causing the data to be deleted and cannot be recovered.

How to do low level formatting with HDD Low Level Format

Once we are clear about what low level formatting means, and its equivalent zero filling, it is time to look for a tool that allows us to carry out this process. HDD Low Level Format is a free application that serves precisely this, to delete data from a hard disk forever. This tool is compatible with the hard drives of the main manufacturers, such as Seagate, Samsung, Western Digital, Toshiba, Maxtor, etc., so that you will have no problems using it.

By using the HDD Low Level Format tool, low level formatting will be easier and faster. Even a computer beginner could make full use of it. You can erase and low-level format a SATA, IDE, SAS, SCSI or SSD hard drive, and it will also work with any external USB drive enclosure, as well as SD, MMC, MemoryStick and CompactFlash media.

Just follow these steps to use the tool:

Download the HDD Low Level Format tool, you can do it from its official website by clicking here. This version does not need installation, so you just have to double click on the downloaded file to use the application.

Connect your hard drive or USB drive to the PC and start the HDD Low Level Format tool. It will offer you the option of acquiring the full version for a very low price, in our case the free version is sufficient, so click on the option below.

Once the tool has already opened, select the desired drive and click " Continue ".

Select " Low Level Format " on the tab and then click " FORMAT THIS DEVICE " to start the low level formatting process. The other two tabs will show us information about the hard drive, in this case we don't need them at all.

Now all you have to do is wait for the program to finish doing its job, once it's finished you'll have your hard drive or USB drive completely free of data. This process can take quite a bit of time depending on the size of the selected drive, so you'd better hope to do it at a time when you're in no rush.

This ends our special article on what is a low level format and how to do it with a tool like HDD Low Level Format, we hope you find it very useful.