4K Sectors?

So, the upshot of this is that drive manufacturers can advertise drives as being larger, while we may be required to waste more of these new found space?
 
Nothing to see here, please move along...

Oh com'n, we all know that sector sizes other than 512 bytes have existed previously? The fact that most optical formats use a 2KB sector size shouldn't make this move surprising.

But it is good to see that HDD manufacturers have seen the sense to make the increase in sector size due the size of the HDD being shipped these days... It a basic, more for nothing extra fix. And it also helps those with SSDs as well, since the underlying 4K cell size can be matched nicely to logical and viewable sector size...

PS. For those old enough, the application "2M" used the same technique to get near 1.8MB usable on standard 1.44MB floppy disks. The fact that MS-DOS could handle sectors of any n^2 size, while semi-modern Windows can't, I do find quite amusing...
 
Chewy509 said:
PS. For those old enough, the application "2M" used the same technique to get near 1.8MB usable on standard 1.44MB floppy disks. The fact that MS-DOS could handle sectors of any n^2 size, while semi-modern Windows can't, I do find quite amusing...
Click to expand...
I actually loved playing around with that utility. Some drives were better at squeezing in more space than others. I remember I could squeeze in roughly 2 MB in some cases as the utility allowed you to use mixed sector sizes, and as many tracks as the drive could support ( some drives could do 86 tracks instead of the default 80 ). Of course, any version of Windows greater than 3.1 couldn't read the disks, although Linux could. And now we're back to non-512 byte sectors on hard drives? You know the saying everything old is new again?
 
OS/2 (Warp 3.0?) shipped on floppies that used a > 1.44MB format. Where's Tony when you need him...
 
So my days of buying new drives for an old OS are numbered? Will the "old" technology drives still be around for a while, or should I buy a bunch of the current 2TB drives soon?
 
What do mean "all your imaging," the boot drive? That will be a small SSD for years to come.
 
I mean that you tend to re-image your drives a lot. You would need to re-run the alignment app every time you did to avoid the performance hit.
 
ddrueding said:
I mean that you tend to re-image your drives a lot. You would need to re-run the alignment app every time you did to avoid the performance hit.
Click to expand...

You mean the data is not on the individual data drives? That sucks.
 
I plan to buy 16 x 2TB of the old-fashioned drives in the next 2 months. I am hoping that gets me through the upheaval of the XP era. I'm not sure if using mostly Hitachi mostly drives is the best choice. WD 72.K is too expensive. :(
 
I may get a few for the backups but my experience with WD drives about 9 months ago indicates that 5400 RPM 2TB drives are not the best option for the primaries. Samsung is always way behind the times, seemingly waiting until the technology is cheap and mature before jumping into the market.
 
The Samsung is now rather pricey at $180. Perhaps it will decrease in a couple of months.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top