On Thu, Nov 05, 2009 at 12:14:15PM -0500, Ted Unangst wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 10:28 AM, Joachim Schipper
> <joac...@joachimschipper.nl> wrote:
> > This seems predicated on the firmware being smart enough to swap out bad
> > sectors for good setors that are addressable but not used in practice.
> > Is the firmware that smart? (I know about wear-levelling and swapping
> > in "reserve" sectors, but that's different - those *cannot* be
> > addressed.)
>
> There are no reserve sectors, there's just sectors. Some of them are
> reserved, but they're no different from the normal sectors.
>
> Think of it like a 6GB machine running PAE (and only one process).
> You can only address 4GB at maximum, but if something goes bad,
> there's other memory your virtual addresses can get mapped to. If you
> are only writing to 1GB of space though, it's easily spread out over
> all 6GB. The high 2GB is not special or different.
I was going to send a "you misunderstood my point" message, but you are
right about the "no special sectors" part, and I knew better. Thanks for
the correction!
Still, the point I was trying to make - that leaving part of your disk
unpartitioned doesn't really help - stands, no?
Joachim
