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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."
Of course fdisk/parted only follow the convention to align to "cylinder" boundaries because Windows and some of its tools will do weird things if a partition is not aligned like that. Linux doesn't have any problems with arbitrary partition offsets and lengths.
...then I find this to be somewhat of an indictment against the open source model when applied to OS development. The default seems to be to fix fires as they arise. If there are no drives with 4k sectors then we don't need to support drives with 4k sectors. Once drives with 4k sectors arrive its up the individual maintainers of each affected tool (fdisk, et. al.) to update their code. Contrast this with a dictatorial model used by Microsoft, where they said, basically, "We know these are going to arrive sometime in the next couple years and we want to be ready when they do. So all you subsystem maintainers whose code is affected by it better build in support now, ahead of time."
Of course, if the Win7 support is crappy or only partially works, then its no indictment at all. Not having used one of these new drives in conjunction with a recent version of Windows, I can't really say one way or the other.
I guess the beauty of Closed Source, then, is that the OS supports it out of the box, without some user having to notice the problem, benchmark the performance hit, figure out (more or less) why its happening, make a big blog post, then wait for a qualified dev to fix the problem and for the major distros to pick up the fix?
Linux is one of the most over rated lumps of shit out there today.
The beauty isn't Closed Source, it's Market Monopoly. You know, the one guaranteeing that device manufacturers make up for your failures by deviating from standards in order to make sure that their devices work out of the box with your broken OS.
Mod this feller up!
If you depend on a GUI you aren't an admin.