Status of support for 4KB disk sectors

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 02:39:28AM -0700, perryh at pluto.rain.com wrote:
> Chuck Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> wrote:
> > On Jul 19, 2011, at 2:10 PM, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> > > On 2011-Jul-19 10:54:38 -0700, Chuck Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> wrote:
> > >> Unix operating systems like SunOS 3 and NEXTSTEP would happily
> > >> run with a DEV_BSIZE of 1024 or larger-- they'd boot fine off
> > >> of optical media using 2048-byte sectors,
> > > 
> > > Actually, Sun used customised CD-ROM drives that faked 512-byte
> > > sectors to work around their lack of support for anything else.
> >
> > Hmm-- my brain could be fuzzy about things twenty-plus years
> > ago.  But I remember booting a Sun3_35 or _60 from a non-Sun
> > or Sun OEM'ed SCSI CD-ROM drive, probably a Plextor?
> 
> IIRC, Plextor (and maybe some others) had a switch to select 512 or
> 2048 as the default transfer size, precisely so that they could be
> used as boot devices with systems that supported only 512.

I don't think Plextor was around back then; they used to be called TEXEL
back in the early 90s.  The only Sun SCSI CD drives I saw were external
and caddy-based, so I mentally correlate them with NEC.  Back then I
wasn't looking at brands as much as I do today, though.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                   Mountain View, CA, US |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.               PGP 4BD6C0CB |