is it possible to format media to 1024 bytes per sector

General questions about HDDRIVER/Allgemeine Fragen zu HDDRIVER
blaylok
Posts: 4
Joined: 17 Mar 2012, 09:54

is it possible to format media to 1024 bytes per sector

Post by blaylok »

Hi Uwe,

I am wondering if i can use hddriver to do a low level format of my CF card to 1024 bytes per sector.
uweseimet
Site Admin
Posts: 408
Joined: 10 Jan 2010, 15:39

Re: is it possible to format media to 1024 bytes per sector

Post by uweseimet »

HDDRUTIL supports formatting media with a user-defined physical sector size, but the device you want to format must also support this. If a drive does not support to select the sector size, the corresponding option in the format dialog is disabled.
I don't think that any recent hard disk drive supports user-defined sector sizes or any other sector size than 512 bytes, and non-SCSI drives or memory cards have never offered this feature at all, as far as I know. There are very old SCSI drives by Fujitsu, for instance, that support almost any sector size that is a multiple of 4.

The advantage of formatting a hard disk drive with a physical sector size of 1024 or 2048 bytes instead of 512 bytes is an increase in the available free capacity, by the way. TOS cannot boot from such a drive, though, because it can only boot from drives with 512 bytes per sector.