On 18:30 18 Oct 2016, D i m bored us all to death with:

No, it's not. It's 'Is Gparted able to see and manipulate data
at a sufficiently low level',

No, it just reads and writes LBAs. ('Sectors' is also used, but isn't
strictly accurate).

just in the same way low level
formatting IDE hard drives *appeared* to do something but
(often) actually did nothing at all.

That's because all but the earliest IDE drives were low level formatted
at the factory. The factory format laid down servo information along
with the data. Allowing a true low level format in the field would
destroy the servo data and render the drive unusable. So the drive
accepts the format command (for compatability) but either does nothing
or zeros itself.

As you would have found out if you'd bothered to google.

--
(\_/)
(='.'=) systemd: the Linux version of Windows 10
(")_(")