You may already realize this but, at least for now, all HDDs on the market with 4k physical sector size still report and work with 512b sector sizes. Some also report extended attributes that let aware OSs know they have 4k physical sector sizes.
Thus, they ARE backwards compatible, and the price for that is that if you aren't able to realize they are 4k underneath then you may get slower performance (5%-10%) on certain operations that "needlessly" cross physical sector boundaries. And yes, you can use multiple logical 512b sectors within the physical 4k sector for different files, so you aren't wasting space on files <4k. Out of curiosity, what are folks generating that would make lots of small files? 4k is only 512 one-byte characters. Add a little metadata and you've not got a lot of information to work with there that would keep you far enough under 4k to showing meaningful waste. My response to this post is 963 bytes worth of characters for example. On 4/11/11 6:44 AM, Jack wrote: > Might be simpler just to KEEP 512-byte sectors, as I am almost certain > they could, IF their firmware-engineers were told to do so in "new" 4K > sector disks. Might also save them a lot of LOST business, for I bet > a "4K and ONLY 4K" decision may cost them a lot of Windows/Linus users > as well, not merely those of us who still use and like DOS. > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Xperia(TM) PLAY It's a major breakthrough. An authentic gaming smartphone on the nation's most reliable network. And it wants your games. http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-sfdev _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
