tim@gumby.cs.caltech.edu (Timothy L. Kay) (06/05/91)
A friend has added a 1GB Micropolis 1598-15 to their SS2. The disk was shipped formatted for 512-byte sectors, and that seems to work just fine. For that sector size, 70 sectors fit on a track. Micropolis technical support tells me that the drive can support 1024-byte sectors, and then you get 38 sectors per track. That would increase the size of the formatted drive by 89MB. My questions are, 1. Can Sun/OS support 1024-byte sectors? 2. Can the Sun/OS format program reformat the drive? 3. What format.dat entry do I want? I read the section on format, and I don't know how to set the bpt and bps fields. How am I supposed to know how many bytes make up the irg and address and data marks? What happens if I get it wrong? Does the format program then miscalculate which sectors are defective? 4. Micropolis technical support says that the drive will also support 4096-byte sectors, but he doesn't know how many on a track. Should I consider this possibility? Tim