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another year+ with 512e drives ?

Soulkeeper

Soulkeeper

Diamond Member
Has anyone confirmed the existence of an Advanced Format drive which does not use 512e ?

Perhaps the next gen drives will be full 4K/4K physical/logical ?
 
But I can tell you nothing is changing until maybe 2014 with advanced format drive and what not, at least that is what I hear. gl
 
Revolution 11 said:
What exactly is the benefit of non-512e drives anyway? Performance, reliability, cost?
Click to expand...

Someone else will likely explain in more detail, but performance and ease of implementation (ie: not worrying about alignment) on modern OS/Software are what i'd consider the benefits.
 
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2510009

I would consider Windows 7 a modern OS, especially since 8 is not even released yet. That doesn't work on purely native 4K drives, 512 emulation is needed. As for performance, if that was so important, SSDs offer much more performance than native 4K drives will.

Granted, native drives are excellent for Windows 8. But until that has widespread availability to the point that earlier OSes are not used much, there is little economic incentive for native drives.
 
512B sector emulation will be with us for a long time. While it takes digging to find out how, sometimes, most drives today can still be made to work on systems with MB- and GB-level limits.

What newer OSes give us is boot-time detection, and partition tool support, so that the emulation can be entirely ignored. Do we use ATA's PIO modes for our 6Gbps SSD? Of course not. But, there is hardware/software out there that may need to.

The emulation layer existing is a good thing, because old software doesn't die out like we might like it to. With OSes and their tools being updated, we can safely say, "just do a clean Windows 8 install," for AF HDDs, just like with SSDs, and not worry about it, beyond that.
 
Soulkeeper said:
Someone else will likely explain in more detail, but performance and ease of implementation (ie: not worrying about alignment) on modern OS/Software are what i'd consider the benefits.
Click to expand...
You don't have to worry about alignment unless you're using ancient cloning software and/or ancient OSes, in which case they won't support 4K native anyway.

There's also no evidence to suggest an aligned 512e drive is slower than the same drive running 4Kn.

The fact is, there no reason to push 4Kn given there's no real advantage and almost nobody can use it.
 
The only real con I've found is that you may have to watch for emulation, on occasion, on OSes that support the native size. I wasted several hours trying to figure out why dd_rescue wasn't working right, FI, and it turned out to be because one drive was 512*, the other 4K, and that just doesn't work right, yet. Plain dd took care of it, after I was able to quickly find that incompatibility with dd_rescue by a little Googling.

* actually, both were the same model number '512e' type drive, but the one on my USB bridge showed up as 512/4096, while the internal one listed as 4096/4096
 
Cerb said:
* actually, both were the same model number '512e' type drive, but the one on my USB bridge showed up as 512/4096, while the internal one listed as 4096/4096
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Wait. Soulkeeper did ask whether there exists 4096/4096 drives, fearing that the answer is still "no", and you said that you have one? 😎
 
mv2devnull said:
Wait. Soulkeeper did ask whether there exists 4096/4096 drives, fearing that the answer is still "no", and you said that you have one? 😎
Click to expand...
My guess is that Linux was doing something funky with it, like hiding the emulation...or maybe the BIOS was doing it...or maybe it can be bypassed if the drive and controller report the right features. I claim to have seen similar fdisk -l output to the guy linked below, and that after enough Googling, found at least one person who had narrowed their ddrescue problem, similar to mine, down to the sector sizes. I don't claim to be an expert on exactly how it should all work, though, with the latest HW and SW.

Edit: See this: http://superuser.com/questions/487414/partition-table-independent-of-sector-size
 
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Cerb said:
* actually, both were the same model number '512e' type drive, but the one on my USB bridge showed up as 512/4096, while the internal one listed as 4096/4096
Click to expand...

I wonder if it is actually the other way round.

A lot of USB/SATA bridges have a translation layer so that they appear to the OS as 4096/4096.

This is because large 4096/4096 drives have better XP compatibility than large 512/512 or 512/4096 drives (neither of which are supported on XP).
 
Mark R said:
I wonder if it is actually the other way round.

A lot of USB/SATA bridges have a translation layer so that they appear to the OS as 4096/4096.

This is because large 4096/4096 drives have better XP compatibility than large 512/512 or 512/4096 drives (neither of which are supported on XP).
Click to expand...

Yes. USB External enclosures often show up as 4k for compatibility reasons. But SATA must use 512.
 
blastingcap said:
Yes. USB External enclosures often show up as 4k for compatibility reasons. But SATA must use 512.
Click to expand...
Mine is similar to this, and Linux sees the SATA controller chip. I don't have any AF drives on hand to check things out with, ATM*.

* Well, technically, I might, but I'm not going to break a RAID array for this! 🙂
 
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