most more modern ones are non-512 byte sectors. The 1024 byte ones were 
pretty common in the used market for a while. i'd think one of the reasons 
they started using bigger sectors was that so much of the platter was being 
used up by those huge sector boundaries.. 
isildur

On Mon, 3 Jun 2002, Manuel Bouyer wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 04, 2002 at 12:53:57AM +0300, Aaro J Koskinen wrote:
> > On Mon, 3 Jun 2002, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> > 
> > > On Mon, Jun 03, 2002 at 12:49:34PM -0700, Bill Studenmund wrote:
> > > > The main locus of the question is what have people been doing so far when
> > > > they use non-512-byte sectors? Yes, we have hacks for CDs. But what have
> > > > the MO folks been doing? Any MO users who can speak up?
> > >
> > > Well, all the MO I have have 512-byte blocks. I'm not sure there is
> > > that much MO drives with larger block size.
> > 
> > Check the data sheets of any MO drive! The sector size is media
> > specific. E.g. Sony's drives can be used with 512, 1024, 2048 and 4096
> > bytes/sector discs. Bigger capacity discs usually have non-512-byte
> > sectors. There may be also performance penalty with 512-byte sectors (I
> > think 512 bytes/sector is only supported for backwards compatibility
> > with legacy systems that do not support other sector sizes, and there's
> > some kind of emulation in drives).
> 
> Yes, I know there exists. But, although I've seen a number of 512-byte
> MO, from various manufacturers, I've never seen a non-512-byte one.
> That's why I wonder if there are that much around ...
> 
> -- 
> Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
> --
>