Long Block Data Standard Finalized

An anonymous reader writes "IDEMA has finally released the LBD (Long Block Data) standard. This standard, in work since 2000, increases the length of the data blocks of each sector from 512 bytes to 4,096 bytes. This is an update that has been requested for some time by the hard-drive industry and the development of new drives will start immediately. The new standard offers many advantages — improved reliability and higher transfer rates are the two most obvious. While some manufacturers say the reliability may increase as much as tenfold, the degree of performance improvement to be expected is a bit more elusive. Overall improvements include shorter time to format and more efficient data transfers due to smaller overhead per block during read and write operations."

Comments

Re:Why 4096?

[42forty-two42]

Operating systems tend to use 4096-byte blocks already, as that's the size of a memory page on x86 and amd64. If you were to require 16kb transfers, then the block cache would have to start allocating contiguous four-page groups for DMA transfers and the like, which could be difficult if memory is fragmented; in comparison, pages are the basic allocation unit for RAM, so 4kb's easy to find.

Re:Discussed Since 2000?

[RingDev]

Saying 4096 was probably the easy part. Of course someone probably had to research what the largest (time efficient) and smallest (space efficient) block size would give the greatest advantage in space/time for current average files. But eventually you get into the issue of working with Hard Drive manufacturers who likely have to redesign some circuits and controls _from scratch_, BIOS developers who have to recode to detect and support two different standards, and OS/Driver developers who also have to deal with any low level changes...

You're talking about interacting with likely hundreds of companies trying to come up with a single standard that 1) they can all agree on and 2) won't make any of them lose money. Good luck.

-Rick

Re:Why 4096?

[AKAImBatman]

Parent is correct. Pretty much every paging-capable microprocessor in existence uses 4K memory blocks, thus why they're the natural size for a hard disk. In the x86 world, the next step up is 4MB blocks. Burst performance of modern hard disks is quite good, but I have to wonder if 4MB blocks would be helpful or harmful to overall system performance? It might reduce the number of pages, that's for sure.

Re:Sounds like a good idea to me.

[Dan Ost]

If that kind of lossage bothers you, use a file system that can pack multiple file tails into the same block (reiserfs for sure, ext4 will too, I think). If you've got lots of small files, the impact can be surprising (my portage tree shrunk by about 100MB just by moving it from ext3 to reiserfs!). I've never noticed a difference anywhere else, however.