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On Tue, 9 Mar 2010, tom wrote:
Julian Hall wrote:'By early 2011 all hard drives will use an "advanced format" that changes how they go about saving the data people store on them.'The idea that it might upset XP users is interesting. I make it about 12 bytes of code to convert from 4k to 0.5k and back again - to make XP work on them, not optimally I'll admit but still work. I hope someone chucks out the code for this along with NFS support for windows!http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8557144.stmBEEB feeding MS fud again?
and look to the host as still having X x 512 byte blocks, but internally will buffer them up until it has a new 4K sector to write, or do a read/modify/write to write just one 512 byte "sector" of an existing 4K sector - the issues come when the host OS intends to write in 4K blocks anyway, so will be sending 8 consecutive writes to the drive - which will be great if the first write is aligned on a 4K boundary, but really bad if it isn't.From what I understand, these drives still respond to blocks of 512 bytes,
And it would pobaby be just fine if it weren't for the MS partition table and MBR which takes up exactly 63 x 512 byte blocks rather than just rounding it up to 64.
The "trick" in Linux would appear to persuade the first partition to start at LBA 64 using good old fdisd, then making sure all partitions are multiples of 4K x 512 byte blocks.
And I guess you could do this then put the drive into an XP/Win7/Vista machine which might work as long as it didn't re-partition it...
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html