Atom 330 drives only enough pins for 32-bit physical addresses

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>


| On Mon, Nov 08, 2010 at 03:45:53PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
| > | From: Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>
| > 
| > | There is no such thing as formatted versus unformatted capacity.
| > 
| > There used to be, in the days of MFM.  Most recent manifestation:
| > floppy disks.
| 
| True, but it has nothing to do with modern hard sectored hard disks.

Customers don't know or need to know if "modern" hard drives are hard
sectored.  My guess is that they are not.  This is not something
exposed on the interface.

Before IDE, it was exposed on the interface between the controller and
the drive (note: I don't mean host adaptor).

As far as I remember, no consumer hard drives were hard sectored.

Some but not all early floppy drives were hard sectored -- mostly for
CP/M machines.  That was one reason that disks were not
interchangeable between all CP/M systems.

| Back when you bought 2MB floppies and got a formatted capacity of 1440KB
| (unless you just a non standard formatting), then there was such a thing.
| It did not apply to harddisks other than a few odd ones early on.

Essentially all disks before IDE had this characteristic.  I don't
remember which came first: IDE or SCSI controllers integrated with the
drive but it was close in time.

IBM Mainframe drives let different files have different blocksizes!
Each track was like a short length of tape.  The idea was that a
programmer could trade RAM for storage density.  Dumb.  Especially
since different models had tracks with different capacity.  I remember
that 7200 bytes was a good block size for a model 2314 drive (one per
track).  This feature might have disappeared in the 30+ years since I
used those machines (but the Z series lives on).

I still have a few hard drives that predate IDE: for my Sun 3/60
(ESDI), for Atari STs (RLL), and for my Nabu 1600 (MFM).
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