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."

Comments

Re:Factors of 10

[Enter the Shoggoth]

[blockquote]The original definition of "byte" was the number of bits used to encode a character of text and is the basic memory-addressable element in a computer. It never originally meant "8 bits".[/blockquote]

That is the definition of 'octet', a term frequently used in telecom. People confuse byte and octet all the time, because popular hardware architectures use an octet as a byte.

Really? I was under the impression that it was the other way around. ie. the reason it's called an octet is because it has 8 bits.

If you have some definitive evidence to the contrary I'd really be interested in seeing it.