It may handle multiple drives or only a single drive. In SCSI and IDE drives, the controller is simplified, and the intelligence is placed onto the drive itself. This refers to the speed of rotation of the disk. Most hard disks rotate at 3600rpm. Sector interleave can also be specified at this time.
High level formatting involves writing directory structures and file allocation tables to the disk.
Often this also means transferring the boot file for the operating system onto the hard disk. Access Time Access time refers to how soon the drive makes data available once issued with the command to read the data. In larger drives used on main frame computers, the disk drives often had timing tracks written. Newer more accurate mechanisms have tended to make this obsolete. This picture shows the physical construction of a hard disk drive.