Zero fill slow down a hard drive???

[WoWchamp]

Does zero filling a hard drive slow it down. This is also wrongly referred to as a low level format or more correctly referred to as writing zeros to the hard drive.

I did this like twice to a 15GB western digital and installed windows on it and the thing runs fast.

I had windows installed on a brand new 320GB sata when I built this rig and now it takes 3x as long to get off the black windows xp loading screen. Does zero filling the drive slow it down, why didnt it slow dow then WD (it loads xp faster on the 15GB IDE 133 WD then the 320GB SATA 1.5).

Is this true, does it happen???

[Tormond]

It shouldnt make any differnce at all other than to possibly fragment the hell out of your drive. A low level format would be BAD however. All hard drives have bad sectors (they actually used to list them on the drive back in the day) it is just the drive knows which ones they are and won't write to them. A low level format ruins this for teh drive and it loses the "knowledge" of the bad sectors. Well this was true 10 years ago but hey who the heck knows anymore. I store data on them and wake up every morning hoping it is still there.
http://www.hardfolding.com/ftag1.php/mem/8597.png (http://www.hardfolding.com?go=38&id=8597)

[WoWchamp]

Well the drive had to be reinitilazed... so does that mean it was really low level formatted???

I used this tool, which I think only writes the surface of the disk and doesnt wipe out anything like that.

http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2006.04.12-HDD-Low-Level-Format-Tool/

[WoWchamp]

Well I did a sandra HDD bandwidth test and it seems my drive is writing at 54MB/S and the random access time is 9 MS

My drive is a Western Digital

This is what device manager lists it as

WCD WD3200JD-22KLB0

[ryan_975]

I thought today's ATA drive won't let you do a LLF anymore. most of the time when I hear of LLF's being done these days people mean "format c: /u" from a dos prompt. I would check you BIOS setup and make sure the drive is being detected correctly. (like correct UDMA settings and what not)

[NulloModo]

It shouldnt make any differnce at all other than to possibly fragment the hell out of your drive. A low level format would be BAD however. All hard drives have bad sectors (they actually used to list them on the drive back in the day) it is just the drive knows which ones they are and won't write to them. A low level format ruins this for teh drive and it loses the "knowledge" of the bad sectors. Well this was true 10 years ago but hey who the heck knows anymore. I store data on them and wake up every morning hoping it is still there.
http://www.hardfolding.com/ftag1.php/mem/8597.png (http://www.hardfolding.com?go=38&id=8597)

How would writing 0s across the surface of the disk fragment it? You are basically bringing it back to a clean slate and have to reinstall everything again after, so your data should be nice and blocky.

I have heard that writing 0s repeatedly across a drive can be hard on it though, and sometimes lead to a quicker failure, though that might just be rumor.

[Tormond]

How would writing 0s across the surface of the disk fragment it? You are basically bringing it back to a clean slate and have to reinstall everything again after, so your data should be nice and blocky.

Ok now that it is even earlier than I should be awake and I will try on this. HDs dont store data sequentially. It places data in the first free space according to the MBR/FAT. If the amount of space in the first free place isnt big enough to store your file then it "fragments" the file and puts the rest of the file in the next free space or spaces. It has always seemed to me that by writing 0s (which is data no matter how you see it) you could cause the drive to basically fragment your files because the drive has all this "data" on it..

That probably made ne sense whatsoever but a 8 moth old and 7AM will do that to you :)

[ryan_975]

the drive itself doesn't decide where store data in the file system, the OS decides which "block of sectors" to tell the hard drive to write the data. The hard drive just figures out using translation where those sectors are on the physical platter and writes them. When doing a Zero Fill the program tells the OS to write Zeros to all blocks of sectors. The OS then tells the hard drive " write 512 0's to sector 0, now write 512 0's to sector 1..." and so on until the last sector is written to. This wipes the hard drive of any FS, partition table and boot records. It's a blank slate after that ready for the OS to create a new clean organized MBR, BL, PT;s, and FS's. Then it gets fudge up the FS with fragmentation.

[davidlem]

I think ryan is the only one who actually knew what he was talking about in this whole thread. kudos

[ryan_975]

davidlem -- thanks.

[WoWchamp]

So why is my windows takeing alot longer to boot??? Ill update drivers on everything but this is annoying.. .takes the little blue bar on the black xp screen 40 passes before xp loads and before it was like 8.

All I did was low level format, that and I didnt install Nvidia IDE drivers that came with my DFI Lanparty (dont think I did last time either so it shouldnt matter) plus this drive is SATA not IDE.

[ryan_975]

First thing I would do is install the drivers. that may just be the problem. If XP doesn't know how to communicate with the interface it'll default to PIO modes. those drivers are there to tell XP how to use UDMA.

You might want to check the device manager to see if Windows is setting up the hard drive to use UDMA or not. don't remember exactly how to do that, maybe someone could fill in the blank there for you.
.
Also is it on a network/internet using ethernet? could be that Windows is waiting for DHCP server to assign it an address. After 30 seconds it times out and moves on. I know that the way it worked in 9x but not sure about XP.

by the way, SATA is a form of IDE (or more correctly ATA)

[tdg]

A zero-fill will not slow a drive down, nor "damage" it anymore than regular writting will. Theres another issue with the install or hardware that would cause slow loading.

[WoWchamp]

Didnt install the IDE drivers before, so why would it matter now???

Everything else has been updated, the only change is that I zero filled the drive.

[ryan_975]

again check all your settings to make sure the drive isn't defaulting to some PIO mode. I do believe that SATA drives still implement a PIO mode since they are still ATA spec