Slashdot Mirror
Changes in HDD Sector Usage After 30 Years
freitasm writes "A story on Geekzone tells us that IDEMA (Disk Drive, Equipment, and Materials Association) is planning to implement a new standard for HDD sector usage, replacing the old 512-byte sector with a new 4096-byte sector. The association says it will be more efficient. According to the article Windows Vista will ship with this support already."
Why not a 4MB sector?
Also, Solitaire will be replaced by Duke Nukem Forever on every shipped copy of Vista. And if you're one of the first 100 in line at any Best Buy when you pick up Vista, you will also get a free Phantom game console.
Well of course Vista will ship with this supported already. Just like WinFS...er..
I'm willing to sell this account for the right price.
I'm sorry, Your response has to be in some form of star-trek (or sci-fi) I would have accepted this however...
Best analogy is Spock's gym locker room
Spock has say, 10 space lockers up and 20 space lockers accross
Spock can only put one thing in a locker, so Spock cant put his gym shorts in the same one as your shoes. But since Spock has lots of socks, He can pile them in, and take up two or three if neccessary.
Space is wasted if Spock uses a really big locker, but it's only holding a sock.
Now, you've got to record where all of this stuff is, or you will take forever to find that sock. (I guess the tricorders are broken) So Spock sets aside a locker to hold the clipboard with designations.
Now to bring this back into real life. There are a _lot_ of sectors on a disk. So keeping track of all of them starts requiring a substantial amount of resources. I imagine they are finding it easier to justify wasting space for small files in order to make it easier to keep track of them. Average file sizes are also going up, so it's not as big of a problem as it used to be either. It's all relative...
That's a bonus for all those boot-sector virus writers - 8 times more space to do their dirty deeds...
Man that takes me back. Where's my toupee....
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Windows Vista will ship with this support already.
Oh YEAH? Well Linux has had support for it for eleventeen years, and the Linux approach is more streamlined anyway!
I know I'm tired because I misread the first name as Inigo and the next thing through my head was
"Hello. My name is Inigo Molnar. You changed the sectors. Prepare to die."
That already exists. It's called a "child." Geeks might think they are hard to obtain, but in fact they tend to pop up unexpectedly quite often. They also have an audio interface, are touch-sensitive, run off of bio-mass fuel, and can even do the dishes after they have been around for a few years. They can be attached to a Playstation or an iPod too. When you first get them they are quite noisy and smelly with a few leaks, but that goes away after the break-in period. They don't come with a users manual though. Documentation is sparse. You have to get a third-party handbook.
However, storing data in them can be a lot of effort (there are special institutions to help with that, called schools), and they are known to lose data every now and then. Moreover, there's often quite a bit lateny in reading data, and in some cases even repeated requests might not suffice to get at the data at all. The data reading speed isn't too fast either, and the writing speed is truly horrible. Moreover, they need years to completely start up (although some data can already be written and read during startup time), and they can't be switched off when you don't need them, because they won't restart again. Also, while they have a sleep mode, you cannot simply activate that. Usually it will only work at certain times, and even then they may refuse to go to sleep for quite some time. It seems, however, that many of them can be sent to sleep mode in the evening by sending them special large data streams (so-called bedtime stories). OTOH they must stay in sleep mode for quite some time to function properly, so don't even think of using them in a 24/7 application (although you have to prepare to support them 24/7, since sometimes they spontaneously end their sleep mode at unexpected times, and in that case they tend to demand for immediate maintenance).
All in all, they are not really a good replacement for a hard disk.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It's like the film... I, DEMA... about an intelligent disk drive who err... needed to save the world *cough*
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Now, offer me money.
Power too. Promise me that.
Offer me everything I ask for.
I want my 512 byte sectors back, you son of a bitch.