>This would require a low-level re-format and would significantly >reduce the available space if it was possible at all.
I don't think it is possible. >> WD has a jumper, >>but is there explicitly to work with WindowsXP, and is not a real way >>to dumb down the drive to 512. > >All it does is offset the sector numbers by 1 so that sector 63 >becomes physical sector 64 (a multiple of 4KB). Is that all? And this forces 4K alignment? >> I would presume that any vendor that >>is shipping 4K sector size drives now, with a jumper to make it >>'real' 512, would be supporting that over the long run? > >I would be very surprised if any vendor shipped a drive that could >be jumpered to "real" 512 bytes. The best you are going to get is >jumpered to logical 512 bytes and maybe a 1-sector offset (needed >for WindozeXP only). These jumpers will probably last as long as >the 8GB jumpers that were needed by old BIOS code. (Eg BIOS boots >using simulated 512-byte sectors and then the OS tells the drive to >switch to native mode). I would assume that such a jumper would change the drive from "4K native" to "pretend to be have 512 byte sectors"/ >It's unfortunate that Sun didn't bite the bullet several decades >ago and provide support for block sizes other than 512-bytes >instead of getting custom firmware for their CD drives to make >them provide 512-byte logical blocks for 2KB CD-ROMs. Since Solaris x86 works fine with standard CD/DVD drives, that is no longer an issue. Solaris does support larger sectors. >It's even more idiotic of WD to sell a drive with 4KB sectors but >not provide any way for an OS to identify those drives and perform >4KB aligned I/O. I'm not sure that that is correct; the drive works on naive clients but I believe it can reveal its true colors. Casper _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
