Joseph McAllister wrote:
OMG> In the inter-sector gap? In my day we never even considered the ISG. I do remember discussions about being able to buffer enough read to do a linear read for small files.
I misspoke slightly ... there was a day when the fastest *PCs* *had* *disk* *interface* *hardware* *that* couldn't deal with a sector in the ISG, so the disks were interleaved such that physically adjacent sectors had non-sequential sector numbers. A 1:3 ratio was common, so the sectors would be numbered 147258369 for example instead of 123456789.
Giving it some thought just now, I guess the 7200rpm hard drives, even 10,000rpm drives, read sequentially as well.
They do now. :-) I'm referring to the age of the PC/XT and PC/AT (early to mid 1980s) and before. Specifically the era of ST-506 and MFM as the most common disk interface standards. Probably 3600rpm or maybe 5400rpm drives, but I don't really remember.
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