Re: Support for 4KB sectors size disk ?

[Arnaud Lacombe <lacombar%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hi,

On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 6:35 PM, Tobias Nygren <tnn%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:40:32 +0000
> David Laight <david%l8s.co.uk@localhost> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 04:45:24PM -0500, Arnaud Lacombe wrote:
>> > Hi all,
>> >
>> > I quickly asked on IRC, but didn't get an answer. Do we have native
>> > support for disk with 4KB sector size in non 512B-legacy mode ? These
>> > disks start to be available in retail (in particular the WD Green
>> > series with cache of 64M) and are quite attractive.
>>
>> Does windows support these disks ?
>> Are they bootable ? If so where does the boot code sit ?
>>
>> In which case what does the MBR partition information look like ?
>> Especially when there are extended partitions ?
>
> I've yet to get my hands on one of those, but as I understand it, the
> disk's firmware provides transparent 512-byte legacy translation, and
> this is the way the drive boots up. So, we should be able to use those
> WD disks out of the box.
> By making sure file system blocks are aligned to physical 4KB boundaries
> you can still tap in to most of the performance benefits.
>
yes, it seems that's what is happening. Some parallel thread on a
FreeBSD forum: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?p=59914. So
there is still a few time before "real" native 4096B-sector-sized
disk.

 - Arnaud