In comp.arch Bill Todd wrote:

But it's difficult to find information about how frequently error bursts
that result in unreadability span a sector boundary.

Well, ancedotally speaking, most of the disk failures I've seen on
my systems have involved clusters of often sequentially unreadable
blocks.

Does anyone know of accessible studies providing such information?

I imaginge thse guys would be good people to ask...

http://research.google.com/pubs/pub32774.html

G.