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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."
I heard some talks from the ZFS folks at Sun about how they were floating the idea to HD mfgr's of just disabling ECC on the drives. ZFS checksums every block, and in a RAID configuration, it would be able to transparently correct any checksum errors. I think this may have also been the motivation behind bringing triple-redundant RAID to ZFS.
The motivating idea was that this would reduce the overhead involved on ECC and gain extra space.
Thoughts?
It is indeed. Unless HDD makers were going to create firmware, and programmers made partition formats, which address each bit individually (which itself would require an enormous amount of space... much larger than the HDD in fact), you will always be unable to live without sectors. The subdivision idea is again relevant. Imagine if every part of the 20 acre plot had to be "addressable" down to the square inch.
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You are confusing physical sector size with cluster size. May file systems are already addressing data in larger blocks. 4096 is very commonly used. They are generally multiples of 512 which is the physical sector size; so that its is easy to calculate the physical sector that needs to be changed when you know the logical.
Its quite possible to have a cluster size smaller than the sector size; the file system would need to be smart enough to determine what other clusters fall on that sector and write them all though.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
It took me longer than it should've to answer this riddle. Shortcut for the similarly caffeine deprived: andrewd18 means "P" as in Windows XP.
Seriously, I was like "Win...dows?" "U...nix?" "Micro...soft?" "OS...X"? "BS...D"?
The ECC (Error Check and Correct) is used for error correction. But generally speaking, the number of bits needed to check a block of data rises slower than the number of bits in the data - probably as the log of the number of bits, though I don't know. So grouping up sectors and providing a slightly longer ECC will save a significant number of the ECC bits. Of course a sector having eight times as many bits is eight times as likely to get corrupted, simply because of its size. But such faults are rare, though not rare enough to ignore. Of course, it will be a fraction less reliable. But the manufacturers do reliability/performance trade-offs all the time, and this is only one more of them. Presumably they reckon they have the reliability under control. If you want greater reliability, you need RAID anyway - to protect against drive failure as well as localized corruption. The probably reckon that anybody with really valuable data will be RAIDed anyway,
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Most of the drive manufactures are releasing tools to align the drives to 4k clusters so they can be used under XP. WDC already has theirs out here: WDC Adv Format Plus instructions on all of their new 1TB and higher drives on how to set them up properly. You do have to jumper them, then format them specially but the drives work fine with 4k clusters. I put one in my work machine on Saturday, works flawlessly.
*I only used WDC because that's the brand I picked up recently. I do know other companies have similar tools and jumper settings on their newer drives as well.
Om, nomnomnom...
Well, it's in Extended Support which for one thing means MS doesn't give a rats ass whether or not XP works with the more efficient AF HDDs, since that's not a security related patch.
Well, that's a fair assessment. Of course, that's a monopoly tactic — any business that dropped support for that widespread of a product in a legitimate competitive environment would find themselves with no customers for the newer product because customers would be trying to migrate out from under that vendor at all costs.
Most used or not, it's 8 years old, and the update cost of a newly purchased machine with a plain OS installation disk includes roughly 2 Gig of downloaded data, and at least 5 reboots. (Measured last week on a clean installation of Windows XP Pro.) Even popular games that are shipping now do not run under it: that tells me it's obsolete.
Sidestepping your ignorance or deliberate deception on periods of typical Linux support contracts
He didn't say if he was stating lengths from release or length of overlap (to me the latter is the more important figure)
Who cares if support goes out 10 years
It's 10 years (5 mainstream, 5 extended) minimum from release, 7 years (2 mainstream, five extended) minimum overlap between releases and 2 years (all extended) minimum overlap if you skip a release. IIRC XP will have exceeded all of those.
if you can't buy a new hard drive that will work with the OS?
These "advanced format" drives will work fine with XP, they just require a little extra effort (either using a third party paritioning tool, fitting an extra jumper to change the sector mapping or using the WD tool to realign the partitions after setup) if you want maximum performance. Besides I can still by PATA drives so I doubt these drives will be the only ones on the market any time soon.
Similarly if I go to almost any major vendor I can still get computers and computer parts that are supported with XP, some of the consumer crap isn't but virtually every buisness machine and seperately sold peice of hardware i've seen lists XP as supported.
It's articles and comments like this that give me difficulty discerning what exactly Microsoft "support" entails.
For most of us the most important part of the support is continuation of security updates (though they have occasionally refused to release one that they really should have released by claiming that it's not nessacery in a default environment), I would be very uncomfortable running exposed systems (and I coun't any machine used to browse the web as exposed) on an OS that was no longer getting security updates.
There is also problem support and non-security hotfixes (free if created while in mainstream support, pay for if created during extended support) but for most of us these are fairly irrelevant.
As I alluded to above though what really matters is support from third party vendors, I can still buy the latest hardware and run XP on it with no problems, just try doing that with a comparable aged linux distro (e.g. debian woody).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register