Re: Disks w/non-512-byte sectors?

[Dan LaBell <dan4l-nospam%verizon.net@localhost>]

On Jan 18, 2015, at 5:56 PM, John D. Baker wrote:
> Second, and the real point of this message:  Some time ago I was given
> several 18GB 10k-rpm SCA SCSI disks that had been removed from an IBM
> AS400.  I knew they had strange native sector sizes (522 bytes in the
> case of the drives I have).  When I hooked one up to one of my NetBSD
> boxes, it was probed and reported reasonable data except for the  
> message
> "preposterous sector size 0x20a bytes".  The test machine netboots and
> otherwise operates via NFS--the disk is just connected for testing.
> It is running a recent build of i386-7.99.4.


I'm wondering if formated this way, the drive provides no error  
detection/
correction,and devotes the whole physical sector to data -- Instead  
of 512 bytes , and
so many bytes for ECC.  I'm also wondering if I have some drives like  
these.
what's dmesg, say about the drives?   Are they little bit taller than  
standard?