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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."
Well, CD-ROMs use 2352 bytes per sector, ending up with 2048 actual bytes after error correction. Looking at the size of the HDDs these days a 4096-byte sector seems pretty reasonable.
Serving time in Aristotelean prison for violating laws of physics
Best analogy is a gym locker room
You have say, 10 lockers up and 20 lockers accross
You can only put one thing in a locker, so you cant put your gym shorts in the same one as your shoes. But if you have lots of socks, you can pile them in, and take up two or three if neccessary.
Space is wasted if you have 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. So you set asside 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...
No, I am not an English major. My posts are subject to typos and incorrect grammar. Do not expect perfection.
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...
HDD manufacturers are looking to increase the amount of data stored on each platter. With larger sector sizes, the HDD vendor can use more efficient codes. This means better format efficieny and more bytes to the end user. The primary argument being that many OSes already use 4K clusters.
During the transition from 512-byte to 1K, and ultimately 4K sectors, HDDs will be able to emulate 512-byte modes to the host (i.e. making a 1K or 4K native drive 'look' like a standard 512-byte drive). If the OS is using 4K clusters, this will come with no performance decrease. For any application performing random single-block writes, the HDD will suffer 1 rev per write (for a read-modify-write operation), but that's really only a condition that would be found during a test.
That's a bonus for all those boot-sector virus writers - 8 times more space to do their dirty deeds...
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.