What Does Formatting Actually Do, Anyway? 

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 ͡°)

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

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.

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!

Got the notification while formating a 30Gigs drive.

Please never stop making these informative videos.

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

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.

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

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.

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'.

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.

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

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!

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."

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.

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

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.

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

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

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😎

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@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.

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.

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

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

Very interesting and informative! Thanks!

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. 🤘🏼🤙🏼

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

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

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

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

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 👍

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

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

Wonderfully technical! Thank you so much!

Superb explanation, thanks!

Thank you for this informative explanation video.💡

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

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.

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!

Very helpful information and indepth thank you

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

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

Thanks for adding the time stamp.

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.

This is a very informative video, thanks so much!

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

Thank you for a very informative and helpful video 😊

Really great information Joe. Esp. on SSD

That was brilliantly informative

It's nice when a RU-vidr 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. )

That was some knowledge in this video!💯

Excellent presentation!!

What a great explanation!

That's the clearest explanation I've ever heard

Informative video. Your videos are suitable for computer class lectures. If a teacher is watching them. Can definitely play or recommend to the students. SmartTJ 😎

Nice video: thanks for the help !!!

Provisional explaining good work thanks

Love the way you explain

Thank you for all this information

Sweet, great video! Thanks!

Thank you, this was really great!!

Useful info thank you

Great explanation Thanks

Fascinating information. Good to know.

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

Thank you for this quality video.

Great explanation!👍

Always awesome content.

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

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

Informative thanks

Awsome info bro!!

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

Thanks a lot this really helped

thanks for the lesson!

Cool. Thanks for sharing.

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

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.

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.

Awesome work

I needed this! I just completed my NTLite Windows 10 version and wanted to store it on my USB drive for my new build. Thank you! Edit: Do I need to non-quick format to use my flash drive for installing windows? What about BIOS updates?

Absolutely wonderful🙌I love the fun facts😂

Quite informative video.

Learn something new thanks!

Very nice video. I want more.

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

You are very informing!!

I love this kind of videos!😃

Cool! Thx for the info

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