Method and apparatus for expanding data storage capacity on a floppy diskette

A method and apparatus for maximizing the data storage capacity of a floppy diskette. The present invention provides a format that reduces the inter-sector gap between adjacent sectors on each track to eight bytes. The storage space gained from the reduction in gap size is used to add additional sectors to each track on the diskette, thereby providing a total of twenty-one sectors per track. Because the gap between sectors is reduced to such a small size, the disk controller may not be able to process the data from one sector before the adjacent sector is to be read. Therefore, sectors are arranged on each track in a 2:1 interleave arrangement, such that one sector separates consecutively-numbered sectors. Additionally, to increase performance, the end of the last sector on each track is offset from the beginning of the first sector on the next track by four sectors.