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HDD Manufacturers Moving To 4096-Byte Sectors

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the zomg-the-world-will-collapse dept.

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. Factors of 10 by suso · · Score: 5, Funny

    Why not just move it to 1000 byte sectors, then we could minimize the space lost to advertising.

    (Note to accuracy nazis, this is meant to be funny)

  2. So only XP is out of luck? by 7o9 · · Score: 5, Informative

    According to the Anandtech article, only the pretty much end-of-life Windows XP is out of luck. Linux, OS X and modern Windows versions all work ... Non news?

    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?

  3. WD is already shipping them by daha · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are certain models of the Western Digital Caviar Green drives that are already shipping with a 4K sector size, such as this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136490

  4. Re:Care to provide examples? by andrewd18 · · Score: 5, Funny

    I realize this is Slashdot, but both of the articles linked talk about the affected operating system. Hint: It shares an ending with a colloquial name for urine.

  5. Re:Care to provide examples? by tepples · · Score: 5, Funny

    I realize this is Slashdot, but both of the articles linked talk about the affected operating system. Hint: It shares an ending with a colloquial name for urine.

    Wii? PSP?

  6. Re:intelligent interfaces by Thanshin · · Score: 5, Funny

    Do you really believe your hard drive has 256 heads?

    It had only six, at first, but we didn't know the thing about burning the stumps.

  7. Re:Care to provide examples? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Solar... isssss

    D:

  8. Re:disable ECC? by butlerm · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's insane. ECC at the hardware / firmware level corrects the vast majority of bit errors transparently in a manner that is invisible to the operating system. If you took out sector level ECC, the drives would be useless in anything other than a ZFS RAID configuration, and even then performance would drop in the presence of trivially ECC correctable errors, due to the re-reads and stripe reconstructions at the filesystem level.

    Drive performance would probably drop because the heads would have to stay in closer alignment without the ability of ECC to correct data read errors caused by small vibrations and electrical noise. In addition, sector relocations would probably increase because tiny flaws that do not impair the ability of a drive to write an ECC correctable sector would force the drive to remap that sector to another part of the disk.

    It is a similar issue with various wire level data transmission schemes. If DSL connections did not use error correcting codes, they would suffer much higher packet loss rates than they do now, especially at distance. Most those packets would generally get retransmitted due to transport level checksum errors, but why resort to performance impairing fall back measures when the problem can be largely eliminated at a lower level?