4k sector ( block format ) and SSD

[miatadan]

Hi

There is article in DailyTech re: hard drives going to 4K sector instead of older 512 byte storage format.

Do all SSD's currently out support this new storage format?
I am hoping the Intel X25-V 40 gb supports this as I will be using Windows 7.

Will give users of XP, another reason to upgrade to Windows 7

Dan

 

[Nothinman]

I think internally the blocks are generally 4K on SSDs however the firmware still presents 512b bocks.

 

[miatadan]

Is it likely that there be firmware updates to SSD's for it to work under new 4K standard instead of 512 bytes.
Is this difficult for companies to change firmware for this in future?

 

[Nothinman]

Intel has already released firmware updates for at least one of their lines, but just like BIOS updates there's a chance that you'll brick your device if you do it. So it's fairly simple for the company to release the new firmware it's more difficult to get people to risk their device to apply the new firmware.

Keep in mind, I still haven't broken down and got myself an SSD yet. I'm just speaking from what I've read.

 

[taltamir]

Hi

There is article in DailyTech re: hard drives going to 4K sector instead of older 512 byte storage format.

Do all SSD's currently out support this new storage format?
I am hoping the Intel X25-V 40 gb supports this as I will be using Windows 7.

Will give users of XP, another reason to upgrade to Windows 7

Dan

SSDs have been 4K since day one... its spindle disks that are now transitioning from 512 B to 4KB sectors (which matches SSDs actually).

As for intel supporting this... huh? the question doesn't make sense. Windows 7 DOES support 4k sectors and correctly aligns partitions on them, which is why its so good for SSDs AND the new drives. you can use those new drives in XP in compatibility mode by you will need to manually align them or have horrible slowdowns.
The SSD doesn't care what your sectors are on spindle drives... You can NOT "format" a drive to the wrong sector size. Whether a drive (or SSD) has a 512B or 4KB sector is completely internal to the drive and CAN NOT be changed. The implementation is vastly different internally between HDD and SSD, but it doesn't matter.

 

[Nothinman]

As for intel supporting this... huh? the question doesn't make sense.

I'd say he's asking if either that SSD comes with 4K blocks exposed by the firmware by default or if the firmware can be "upgraded" to do so.

 

[taltamir]

I'd say he's asking if either that SSD comes with 4K blocks exposed by the firmware by default or if the firmware can be "upgraded" to do so.

which still doesn't make sense... its like hearing that someone developed a diesel car and asking if your own car supports it. The two are completely unrelated.
And no "upgrade" is possible between sector schemes.

All that matters is whether your OS supports whatever it is that the drive uses (or if the drive has some built in emulation to allow use with unsupported OS), the answer to both is "yes" (so, it will just work no matter your OS drive configuration).

 

[Nothinman]

which still doesn't make sense... its like hearing that someone developed a diesel car and asking if your own car supports it. The two are completely unrelated.
And no "upgrade" is possible between sector schemes.

Except the 512b block presentation is done entirely in firmware, so it should be a simple task to change he firmware to present 4K blocks. Provided Intel wanted to do so.

All that matters is whether your OS supports whatever it is that the drive uses (or if the drive has some built in emulation to allow use with unsupported OS), the answer to both is "yes" (so, it will just work no matter your OS drive configuration).

Except that XP won't work with 4K blocks AFAIK and if the device does present 512b blocks and the partition isn't aligned right it'll cause a lot of extra work for the firmware.

 

[taltamir]

Except the 512b block presentation is done entirely in firmware, so it should be a simple task to change he firmware to present 4K blocks. Provided Intel wanted to do so.

Possible, yes. Easy? not in the least.

Except that XP won't work with 4K blocks AFAIK and if the device does present 512b blocks and the partition isn't aligned right it'll cause a lot of extra work for the firmware.

And 4k block drives have 512b emulation which allows XP to work with them. maybe I Wasn't being clear enough.
As for improper alignment causing extra work.. I said that too (just in an earlier post)

 

[Nothinman]

Possible, yes. Easy? not in the least.

Why? From the user's perspective they would just update the firmware like they would any other and Intel has already released firmware updates for at least one of their SSDs. From Intel's perspective it would likely just involve removing a bunch of code and retesting it.

 

[Mark R]

What would be the point of changing a drive to use 4kb sectors?

SATA supports multisector writes and reads (up to 512 kB) in one go.

The only benefit 4k sectors bring are to spinnig drives, where the larger sectors permit the use of more efficient error correcting codes and there is less overhead for marking out the sectors. I can't see any benefit for SSDs.

 

[Nothinman]

What would be the point of changing a drive to use 4kb sectors?

Because memory pages on IA32 are 4K it makes more sense and should keep the code simpler. Of course that probably won't be true for a long time since drivers will have to check the size of an individual device's sectors so both, or more, code paths will exist for a long time.

What would really be awesome is if some controller would let an SSD be mapped directly into memory so that we could do XIP from SSDs.

 

[taltamir]

From Intel's perspective it would likely just involve removing a bunch of code and retesting it.

ok I am getting confused as to what you are talking about. Intel SSD cannot just change the internal block structure "easily", not drive can.

 

[Nothinman]

ok I am getting confused as to what you are talking about. Intel SSD cannot just change the internal block structure "easily", not drive can.

They wouldn't be changing anything physically in the device since they almost assuredly use 4K blocks internally already and just present 512b blocks to not confuse legacy OSes like XP.

 

[Voo]

ok I am getting confused as to what you are talking about. Intel SSD cannot just change the internal block structure "easily", not drive can.

Yeah I think you're really confused.

SSDs internally already work with 4k blocks, that's a problem for XP because it assumes 512b blocks, so the FW emulates (!) 512b blocks. So the only thing Intel has to do would be to remove that code and let the OS work with the real blocks.

Not really that much work probably, because that's how the drive should work and emulating is only some extra piece of abstraction - granted the engineers coded that part properly. But I'd say chances are small that Intel will ever do it, even if it's not that much work they still have to test it thoroughly and we can just buy a new drive from them if we want it, can't we? *sigh*

 

[taltamir]

I was confused about what he was asking for. I thought he was asking if it could just be modified to actually store data in 512B blocks instead of 4kb blocks (requires massive chances to hardware and firmware). not to drop emulation of 512B blocks (minor firmware change).

yea I would prefer 512B sector emulation to be optional, I don't give a damn about XP compatibility and it would certainly avoid issues (especially with no MS operating systems) if it just honestly presented itself to the OS instead of lying for the sake of backwards compatibility.
I am actually concerned about the same issue with "advanced format" drives in regards to ZFS compatibility.