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User-instigated low-level formatting (LLF) of hard disk drives was common for minicomputer and personal computer systems until the 1990s. IBM and other mainframe system vendors typically supplied their hard disk drives (or media in the case of removable media HDDs) with a low-level format. Typically this involved subdividing each track on the ...
Low-level format utility performing interleave speed tests on a 10-megabyte IBM PC XT hard drive. Historically, interleaving was used in Minimizing missed rotations between instructions on computers storing instructions on a drum memory; Ordering block storage on storage devices such as drums, floppy disk drives and hard disk drives. The ...
When a soft-sectored disk is low-level "formatted", each track is written with a number of bytes calculated to fit within 360 degrees at the highest expected motor speed. Special bit patterns are written right before the location where a sector should start, and serve as identifiers, similar to the punched holes used by hard-sectored disks.
The format was standardized as EIA-741 and co-published as SFF-8501 for disk drives, with other SFF-85xx series standards covering related 5.25 inch devices (optical drives, etc.) [33] The Quantum Bigfoot HDD was the last to use it in the late 1990s, with "low-profile" (≈25 mm) and "ultra-low-profile" (≈20 mm) high versions.
For most disks, each sector stores a fixed amount of user-accessible data, traditionally 512 bytes for hard disk drives (HDDs), and 2048 bytes for CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs and BD-ROMs. [1] Newer HDDs and SSDs use 4096 byte (4 KiB) sectors, which are known as the Advanced Format (AF). The sector is the minimum storage unit of a hard drive. [2]
Low-level formatting software from 1987 to find highest performance interleave choice for 10 MB IBM PC XT hard disk drive. Sector interleave is a mostly obsolete device characteristic related to data rate, dating back to when computers were too slow to be able to read large continuous streams of data.
Microsoft advertised DoubleSpace on the cover of MS-DOS 6 distributions (user's guide for MS-DOS 6 with Windows 3.1 pack-in pictured, DoubleSpace sticker top-right). In the most common usage scenario, the user would have one hard drive in the computer, with all the space allocated to one partition (usually as drive C:).
It also increases the speed of diskette I/O on these specially formatted disks using a technique called "Sector Sliding". In this technique, the physical sectors on the disk are ordered in such a way that when the drive advances to the next track, the next logical sector waiting to be read is immediately available to the read head.