Linux Not Quite Ready For New 4K-Sector Drives

Theovon writes "We've seen a few stories recently about the new Western Digital Green drives. According to WD, their new 4096-byte sector drives are problematic for Windows XP users but not Linux or most other OSes. Linux users should not be complacent about this, because not all the Linux tools like fdisk have caught up. The result is a reduction in write throughput by a factor of 3.3 across the board (a 230% overhead) when 4096-byte clusters are misaligned to 4096-byte physical sectors by one or more 512-byte logical sectors. The author does some benchmarks to demonstrate this. Also, from the comments on the article, it appears that even parted is not ready, since by default it aligns to 'cylinder' boundaries, which are not physical cylinder boundaries and are multiples of 63."

Comments

Re:Oh slashdot..

[hduff]

Dear Slashdot,

Nothing in this news story is inaccurate, but to make it a point to say that Windows XP is incompatible with no mention of Vista and 7 being perfectly compatible should be an embarrassment of journalistic integrity.

You are correct. It is a non-issue because nobody uses WindowsXP anymore and there are no legacy systems running it. Nor will there ever be a need to use a new drive in a WindowsXP stsem since there are no WindowsXP systems in use. You are correct.

Re:Open Source to the rescue

[Sir_Lewk]

Whose fault is it that the majority of Windows users are still using Windows XP?

Nobody's but Microsofts. Microsoft is the reason this shit situation exists.