[quote M A V I C][quote GGD][quote M A V I C]None of those are limited to binary constrictions. Storage capacity pretty much is, and the bit from me you quoted was in reference to Seagate being part of the computer industry so the quote is out of context as well.
As I pointed out earlier in this thread, it's only semiconductor storage that is limited to bimary constrictions, not rotating magnetic storage. In fact the hard drives on one of the first computers that I used had 480 bytes in a disk sector.
But can computers write to such devices in a non-binary way?
You're confusing binary data storage with binary data addressing. The data stored on the drives are bits 0/1, but the there is no binary restrictions to how many bits can be stored on a magnetic media. Even when using 512 byte sectors, there's nothing that says that the number of sectors stored on a track has to be a power of two, it's going to be whatever the recording density allows, and that can vary from the inner to the outer tracks.
Semiconductor memory does have binary addressing restrictions, since they are built as a matrix of bits with a row and column address used to select the bit, and the memory density is the same across the entire chip, so they are designed to populate all of the bits that can be addressed by the binary row/column addresses which is why they have a power of two number of bits.
BTWl Here a data sheet from a drive that was popular with minicomputers in the 1980's, the Fujitsu Eagle M2351, and even then it measured megabytes as 1,000,000 bytes, it had an unformatted capacity of 474,214,400 bytes and claimed 474.21 megabytes.
http://www.sun3zoo.de/en/specs.html
And back then it was common to quote unformatted capacity (which has nothing to do with filesystems BTW), because the drive itself didn't have a controller, the controller was separate and it decided how to divide those raw bits into sectors and how much overhead was used for address markers and error detection and spare sectors. Today those functions are all combined into an on-drive controller, and the size quoted is the actual formatted size.
