Why doesn HDB-DOS fully support hard drives with 512 byte sectors?
A.Virtually all SCSI and IDE drives today use 512 byte sectors, whereas HDB-DOS as always used only the first 256 bytes of each sector, effectively wasting half of the drive’s space. Unfortunately Disk BASIC, not to mention a lot of existing software, was written with the assumption that sector sizes are always 256 bytes. Attempting to change HDB-DOS to use all 512 bytes of a sector would break compatibility with a good deal of disk utilities. We even looked at doing sector de-blocking, a common method where the drive still looks like a 256 byte sector device from a software standpoint, but decided against it because it would take up too much code space and affect performance. Additionally, prices have dropped so much and hard drive sizes have increased in the same manner that we feel there is little justification and too much risk in changing HDB-DOS to support full 512 byte sectors.
