Paper?!?!? You had paper??!?! We had to scratch binary into stone tablets with our fingernails, then Paul was driving the cart full of tablets pushed to hard and crashed into a wall spilling several tablets to the ground and breaking them, thus effectively creating the first hard drive crash.
Especially disturbing was the damage to the tablet with the partition information.
Heh, partition tablet…I kill me.
I imagine the crash caused the tablets to become terribly fragmented. 
Just about 5 years ago, on my last ditch effort to use a Maxtor drive, the Maxtor folks sent me a dos-based text version low level formatter than took over 48 hours to run. So perhaps low-level formatting can still be done nowadays, although i dearly hope not. Since if you have to do a low level format, you’re better off buying a new drive anyway.
As an aside, i very clearly recall installing Windows XP on Western Digital raptor drives (RAID0, don’t yell at me) and did a full format in about 12 seconds. I thought i pressed the wrong button. So i rebooted from the CD again, did my controller drives, full format again in 12 seconds. Just out of curiousity, i rebooted a 3rd time to do the quick format and it went by in 3 or 4 seconds as expected. What makes raptors so much faster, other than 10K rpm? If it matters, why are servers able to format SCSI3 drives in the same amount of time?
Yeah, if you call that livin’.
