A method and apparatus for increasing formatting efficiency of a disk drive is
disclosed. In one embodiment, a method for storing data in a disk drive is provided.
The disk drive is coupled to a computer via an interface. The method includes the
steps of storing data on a disk surface in a disk block having a predetermined
length; and, presenting data from the disk drive to the interface as a host block
having a predetermined length, wherein the predetermined length of the disk block
is equal to N times the predetermined length of the host block, where N is a natural
number greater than 1. In one embodiment, a read/modify/write procedure is provided
to ensure that data is not lost when a power failure occurs during a write operation
when the number of host blocks being written is not a multiple of N.
