This is now being discussed at Talk Disk formatting Three levels of formating where there is some support for my belief File Systems Hi In your spare time you might take a glance at List of file systems and Comparison of file systems this appears to me to be yet another PC and minicomputer oriented article completely oblivious to IBM and other mainframe systems There is some coverage at MVS MVS filesystem I will defer to your expertise in this matter but it seems the lack of IBM Access Methods BDAM SAM ISAM and VSAM from these articles is a serious omission Comment