In a storage device, such as a magnetic rigid disk drive, data is stored at varying linear densities in the user data storage portions to increase the effective storage capacity of the device as a function of the differences in soft error rate tolerance associated with the various types of data being stored and the ability of non-alphanumeric data to be enhanced by reconstruction or smoothing rather than by an error correction code. A data type signal included with incoming data dictates the recording frequency and a control signal associated with the recorded data block is read when data is addressed to appropriately adjust the clock frequency for reading such addressed stored data.