another year+ with 512e drives ?

[Soulkeeper]

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 ?

 

[tweakboy]

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

 

[Soulkeeper]

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

that's kinda what I was thinking after reading the AF transition page from seagate and the wiki.
seagate just announced their new enterprise update all are 512e (like the new wd drives), so looks like we are stuck for awhile.

 

[Revolution 11]

What exactly is the benefit of non-512e drives anyway? Performance, reliability, cost?

 

[Soulkeeper]

What exactly is the benefit of non-512e drives anyway? Performance, reliability, cost?

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.

 

[Revolution 11]

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.

 

[Cerb]

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.

 

[BFG10K]

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.

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.

 

[mv2devnull]

This very recent thread: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2276019
went over pros and (mostly) cons of 4Kn.

It does not look like there are any 4Kn yet, not even such where one would have 512e but could disable it. Too many systems still, where 4Kn would not work. Selling a product that only the Men Who Know What They Are Doing can use, is not sane.

 

[Cerb]

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

 

[mv2devnull]

* 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

Wait. Soulkeeper did ask whether there exists 4096/4096 drives, fearing that the answer is still "no", and you said that you have one?

 

[Cerb]

Wait. Soulkeeper did ask whether there exists 4096/4096 drives, fearing that the answer is still "no", and you said that you have one?

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

 

[tweakboy]

What exactly is the benefit of non-512e drives anyway? Performance, reliability, cost?

All 3 but mostly cost.

 

[Mark R]

* 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

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).

 

[blastingcap]

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).

Yes. USB External enclosures often show up as 4k for compatibility reasons. But SATA must use 512.

 

[Coup27]

Ignore.

 

[Cerb]

Yes. USB External enclosures often show up as 4k for compatibility reasons. But SATA must use 512.

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!