ylli122 wrote:
I was just reading through some ATA documentation and noticed that the Format command was depreciated some time ago. According to the wiki this occured sometime after the ATA-3 standard.
While it's true that FORMAT TRACK was removed from ATA after ATA-3, it was always depreciated. ATA-1 says drives are free to ignore the command. It exists purely for backwards compatibility with software that expects a MFM, RLL, or ESDI drive.
ylli122 wrote:
In the case of such a drive, is it even possible to initiate a low-level format of the drive programmatically?
Generally, no. There are some pre-ATA IDE drives that can be low-level formatted, but you really need model-specific commands to do it right. Incorrectly performing a low-level format on a drive can permanently damage it.
Ethin wrote:
the original ATA8 ACS standard
Er, I wouldn't call ATA-8 original when it's the eighth version of ATA. (And ATA itself evolved from several different Western Digital drive controllers.)