It depends on what you're comparing *with*. 32-sectored hard-sectored 8" floppies have a bit more capacity than IBM 3740 (26-sector) soft-sector format. But once you start going to double density, longer (and fewer) sectors, etc., the soft-sector formats start looking better, but only because the hard-sectored disks weren't evolving anymore at that point. They could've kept up, if it wasn't for advances in floppy disk controller technology which made the soft-sectored formats more attractive. In terms of early (early and mid-70's) hardware, hard-sectored floppies required less "smarts" in the disk controller because they don't have to deal with sector marks in the read signal. (Remember that early 8" soft-sectored floppy controllers lacked the smarts to write the address marks, and they reserved that function for special-purpose formatters. We aren't talking about a LSI chip, we're talking about a square foot or two of PCB stuffed densely with SSI TTL.) But then the FDC-on-a-chip came along (from WD, NEC, and others) and these had built-in circuitry for dealing with soft-sectored details. Others (like Wozniak) moved the FDC functions to the CPU and avoided both the FDC-on-a-chip *and* the square feet of PCB's typical of previous floppy disk controllers. -- Tim Shoppa Email: shoppa(a)trailing-edge.com Trailing Edge Technology WWW: http://www.trailing-edge.com/ 7328 Bradley Blvd Voice: 301-767-5917 Bethesda, MD, USA 20817 Fax: 301-767-5927