Ade Vickers wrote: ... > I must admit, I was assuming Sinclair had used 1024 byte blocks on his > microdrives - I may need to be corrected on that.
Sinclair used 512 byte blocks/sectors on the mdvs. ^_^ (AFAIK) When a cartridge was formatted, the blocks were written with decreasing block numbers; thus the highest block still valid gave the max capacity of that format - duff sectors and the [root] directory would decrease the available blocks. The space available in K is simply half the number of free sectors. For floppies, it depends upon the capacity of the disk as to how many sectors = 1 block. eg for ED, it was 3 sectors/block. >>Of course, the capacity decreases when you format the disc as >>well (how did they work out the unformatted capacity, >>because, if it is unformatted then you cannot store anything on it !) > > Stephen Usher's description of the perils of formatting is amongst the best > I've ever seen. It's true that you can lose staggering amounts of disk space > to a bad file format... My ED disks are described as 4M unformatted. Under DOS (fat) they provide 2.88M, on the QL, I get 3.2M. _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
