Randy Zagar wrote: > I don't believe this statement is correct. The number of sectors per > track/cylinder is, I believe, a constant. That constant is in a particular context, and that context has to be mentioned. In the context of a file system, it is most likely true. Regularity in mapping block numbers on cylinders/tracks/sectors makes the file system faster. But in the context of what a disk controller is capable of doing with the formatting on a disk, I do not think it is necessarily true. Floppy disk controllers are certainly capable of formatting each cylinder with as many or few sectors as are required. Indeed, that was one of the several ways floppy copy protection used to work: by adding an extra sector to an outer track, whith the knowledge that it wouldn't be discovered by ordinary disk copiers, and the expectation that it wouldn't be discovered by anyone with a sector editor. The Mac formatting has already been presented -- it is an example of varying number of sectors per track. It's a long time since I worked with hard disk controllers, and those were then clearly not the kind in use today. But I would be surprised if it wasn't still possible to format tracks with 'any' numbers of sectors that the media was capable of recording. A quick look through the programming manual for the chip in question should settle the question for that particular chip. -- Anders Thulin Anders.X.Thulinat_private 040-661 50 63 Telia ProSoft AB, Carlsgatan 6, SE-201 20 Malmö, Sweden ----------------------------------------------------------------- This list is provided by the SecurityFocus ARIS analyzer service. For more information on this free incident handling, management and tracking system please see: http://aris.securityfocus.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Jul 13 2001 - 15:22:56 PDT