Half on, half off -- New CD-R drive and 512-byte blocks

Hi everybody. This isn't strictly on topic, but I think the intent of the question makes it close enough. I just bought a new CD-RW drive -- a Sony CRX145s -- and am curious about whether it may read the 512-byte blocks necessary for using it as a backup boot device on my VAXen, Sparc, SGI, etc. Does anyone know whether this, or just for information, some other CD-RW unit, will do such a thing? Note that I do know that discs are written in 2048 byte blocks, and the answer won't affect its performance in writing disks on these systems. I am also aware that doing this for the long term may needlessly shorten the life of the drive. As I said above, it is more for curiosity, and eventually I would like to know that in case my RRD42 dies, I have a backup. :) Chris Christopher Smith, Perl Developer Amdocs - Champaign, IL /usr/bin/perl -e ' print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl Hacker.")."\x08!\n"); '