>> NeXT used 1024 byte sectors by default, but [...]
> That does not fit with my experience.  But I'm talking about the low
> level device formatting, at the SCSI transfer level, and not the
> higher level file system.

So am I (though I didn't write the double-quoted text above).

> I believe that NeXT shipped all drives with 512 byte block
> formatting.

Well, the first NeXT I owned came with a disk that was formatted (in
the sense of a FORMAT UNIT operation) with 1024-byte sectors - indeed,
I have that disk carefully set aside for use when experimenting with
other sector sizes (right next to a SCSI floppy I have that has
256-byte sectors).  How it got that way, I cannot say for sure; I got
it second-hand.  The previous owner was not much of a geek, and I doubt
he would have gone to any trouble to achieve that - but I do not know
how many other owners the machine may have had.

This was with NeXT's release 2.1; I've never used anything newer.  The
machine was a cube, not a slab, and when I got it had a floptical,
which I approximately never used.

> The file system used allocation blocks of 1024 bytes, but this meant
> that pairs of 512 byte blocks were read at the low level.

And in this respect it's no different from most NetBSD FFS filesystems,
which generally are 1k/8k.

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