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From: ericb@hplsla.HP.COM (Eric Backus)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: FDFORM17.ZIP - Floppy disk formatter - up to 1.8 mb per disk!
Message-ID: <11230003@hplsla.HP.COM>
Date: 15 Jun 91 00:31:46 GMT
References: <7EC1B16060603144@rulcri.LeidenUniv.nl>
Organization: HP Lake Stevens, WA
Lines: 26

>pd1:<msdos.dskutl>
>FDFORM17.ZIP    Floppy disk formatter - up to 1.8 mb per disk!
>
>FDFORMAT, a replacement for the DOS-Format program, has the following
>advantages:
>
>3) Increasing the capacity of your disks up to 300 kByte additional storage.
>5) Enhance speed of your diskette I/O up to 100% with sector sliding.
>   This is a method of physical ordering sectors in a way, that your
>   drive is ready to read the next logical sector, when your head ad-
>   vances one track.

These are quite impressive sounding.  I have to wonder if there is a
downside to increasing the storage capacity and/or I/O speed in this way?
Okay, one downside is you have to have FDREAD resident in memory to
read/write the larger capacity diskettes.

Does doing this make it difficult/impossible to spare bad sectors?  If so,
does that matter?  Does it make the diskette less reliable?

I like the idea of 1.8 MB diskettes, but I am not willing to sacrifice data
integrity, especially on my backups!
--
				Eric Backus
				ericb%hplsla@hplabs.hp.com
				(206) 335-2495