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HDD Manufacturers Moving To 4096-Byte Sectors

Luminous Coward writes "As previously discussed on Slashdot, according to AnandTech and The Tech Report, hard disk drive manufacturers are now ready to bump the size of the disk sector from 512 to 4096 bytes, in order to minimize storage lost to ECC and sync. This may not be a smooth transition, because some OSes do not align partitions on 4K boundaries."

9 of 442 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So only XP is out of luck? by gbjbaanb · · Score: 5, Insightful

    whoooooo. WinXP is end-of-life? You'd best tell that to all the millions of users (including big businesses) out there.

    What that's you say? Upgrade to Windows 7 and use its perfectly infallible XP mode?

    Ah, I understand now. Hi Bill, how's Steve getting on, still a bit sweaty and concerned he's not selling enough?

  2. Re:So only XP is out of luck? by lorenlal · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Eventually, you have to put a line in the sand. If you push off the deadline, manufacturers will still take their time, and they'll be in the same place 9 years and 11 months from now.

    Example: IPv6.

  3. Re:So only XP is out of luck? by alen · · Score: 3, Insightful

    MS has a clear support policy. Maybe you like Apple's 3 year support policy better than Microsoft's 10 year 7/3 policy?

  4. Re:So only XP is out of luck? by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Except that pretty much every OS in use now has IPv6 support.

    Except that name resolution is broken for IPv6 on Windows XP, which is the operating system not supporting 4k sectors that people are complaining about... so IPv6 was a super shitty example for you to try to defend.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  5. Re:disable ECC? by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It doesn't seem like a great idea to me. There are a lot of different ECC algorithms and implementations. It seems to me that it would be better to let the hard drive manufacturer select one that closely matches the expected signal and noise characteristics of a particular disk drive rather than some generic algorithm in the filesystem.

  6. Re:So only XP is out of luck? by kbielefe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sidestepping your ignorance or deliberate deception on periods of typical Linux support contracts, it still amazes me that comments touting Microsoft support periods continue to appear on articles like this. Who cares if support goes out 10 years if you can't buy a new hard drive that will work with the OS? It's articles and comments like this that give me difficulty discerning what exactly Microsoft "support" entails. A warm fuzzy number you can call where they say you have to upgrade to Windows 7 for that hardware to work?

    --
    This space intentionally left blank.
  7. Re:Factors of 10 by m1xram · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That's Grey Code. 000, 001, 011, 010, 110, 111 and the joke should read...

    There are only 11 types of old timer geeks... :-)

  8. Re:So only XP is out of luck? by Idiot+with+a+gun · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I've never understood this long living love for XP. The longer I work with it (I'm a support tech), the more I hate it. It genuinely has the feeling of an OS that was organically grown, without any fore planning. Wireless control often ends up in the hands of a user-space program instead of in the OS (wtf?), and updates are done through a god awful activex webpage. Blech. The long term (and even short term) stability of XP these days is poor at best, and I have no clue why everyone claims to love it.

    On the other hand, most people I've met who make fun of Vista, never used it. My dad was slamming it earlier "Did you ever use it?" "... No". The vast majority of complaints about it stemmed from 2 problems:
    • The so called "power users" always complain about any change, regardless of whether or not it's good.
    • Underpowered machines were marked as "Vista Capable" when they were not.

    And to honest, 7 is quite good. This is coming from a die hard Linux user (who actually liked Gentoo).

  9. Re:Factors of 10 by drsmithy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's also worth noting that this is Microsoft's fault. Other OS's are doing it properly. Microsoft only does it properly when it benefits them. HDD manufacturers have faced numerous lawsuits simply because Microsoft is using the wrong prefix, so people feel cheated out of space.

    I hate to rain on your anti-Microsoft parade, but back when hard disk manufactures realised they could make their hard disks look bigger than they really were, capacities were still being measured in 10s of MB, and *all* OSes were using power-of-two prefixes.

    The rest of your rant is about as accurate.