On 8 Jul, Peter Wemm wrote: > Julian Elischer wrote: >> this is not a 'reformat' >> >> what I want to do is an old-fashionned refomat/verify where the controller >> writes new track headers etc. > > The thing is, just about all IDE drives more than a few GB or so do 'track > writing' and have no fixed sectoring or sector positioning. ie: each time > you write a single sector to a track, it does a read-modify-write of *THE > ENTIRE TRACK*. This is why we have to have write caching turned on for IDE > drives to get decent performance. Without it, it essentially rewrites the > entire track over and over and over again because it cannot fill its write > buffer in order to write a contiguous block to completely replace what was > there before. ie: each track is one giant physical sector with multiple logical > sectors inside it. > > The really annoying thing is that most newer scsi drives do this too.
How readily available is the information about which drives do this? As someone who only buys the occasional drive, I'd rather not have to buy one and do the evaluation myself using the method mentioned later in this thread. > Get a UPS if you value the data. :-] That doesn't help if the cat knocks a book off the shelf onto the power switch, or if you trip over the cord between the UPS and the computer, or if the magic smoke escapes from the computer power supply. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
