Need Community input on 4K-sector drives

[kenoka]

GPT can definitely wait. GPT isn't necessary to support 3TB disks, only 2.2+TB disks that are using 512B sectors. Disks using 4K sectors could have 8+TB using the existing system.

 

No, they cannot.  The 4K sectors are not exposed by the drive to the OS.

Right, that's with the current generation of advanced format drives, which use legacy emulation in order to ease the transition to larger sectors. But soon, you'll have native advanced format drives that won't do emulation, because the rest of the industry will have caught up. Really, unRAID and Windows XP are probably the last holdouts who are still hard coded to start partitions at sector 63.

 

It's all a bunch of workarounds right now, because there are still A LOT of machines running XP. I'm not saying that it's going to be a smooth transition, or that everything will work right. I'm just stating that native advanced format drives, when paired with an OS that partitions properly to support them, will support much larger drives than the current limit without resorting to UEFI or GPT.

 

Drive manufacturers won't be able to depend on UEFI/GPT for years, for the same reason why they can't just jump to advanced format today: the PC market is riddled with legacy hardware which has to be supported. It's going to be kludgey for awhile, but I expect we'll see some native advanced format drives within the next year or two, or drives which can switch emulation on and off, perhaps via firmware.

[bubbaQ]

But soon, you'll have native advanced format drives that won't do emulation,

 

No we won't.  Manufacturers have no need to expose the 4K sectors since they are handled as is with GPT partitions.... and GPT is how every manufacturer is addressing those drives.  Exposing 4K sectors to the OS makes no sense since GPT is available.  All that would do is allow standard MBR partitions to continue to be used, but at a huge risk of various programs choking badly and corrupting drives.

 

Really, unRAID and Windows XP are probably the last holdouts who are still hard coded to start partitions at sector 63.

 

No they aren't.  And even if they were, the number of apps that have 512B sectors hard coded is very, very long.

 

FWIW, the standard was not to have 63 hard coded, they are coded to start partitions on a cylinder boundary.

[Joe L.]

FWIW, the standard was not to have 63 hard coded, they are coded to start partitions on a cylinder boundary.

Correct.  And if the drive were to report its geometry as cylinders of 64 sectors instead of 63 sectors unRAID would start the partition on sector 64.

 

That one tiny change in how they report their "fake" geometry would make them compatible with unRAID (and perhaps XP too)

[kenoka]

I'll certainly bow to your guys' greater expertise here. Thanks for the correction.

[lionelhutz]

Really, unRAID and Windows XP are probably the last holdouts who are still hard coded to start partitions at sector 63.

 

I've seen no tests or proof that any other OS will support native exposed 4k sectors either. And no-one can do such tests until a drive is released.

 

Then, if such drives appear we won't want to start the partition at sector 63 or 64 anymore either. The first partition would likely start somewhere around sector 16.

 

Peter

 

[kenoka]

But soon, you'll have native advanced format drives that won't do emulation,

 

No we won't.  Manufacturers have no need to expose the 4K sectors since they are handled as is with GPT partitions.... and GPT is how every manufacturer is addressing those drives.  Exposing 4K sectors to the OS makes no sense since GPT is available.  All that would do is allow standard MBR partitions to continue to be used, but at a huge risk of various programs choking badly and corrupting drives.

 

Really, unRAID and Windows XP are probably the last holdouts who are still hard coded to start partitions at sector 63.

 

No they aren't.  And even if they were, the number of apps that have 512B sectors hard coded is very, very long.

 

FWIW, the standard was not to have 63 hard coded, they are coded to start partitions on a cylinder boundary.

 

Just out of curiosity, which other OSes are affected in the same way? I know that the rest of the Windows family of XP's generation do, but subsequent versions (e.g. Vista onward) don't.

 

Why does it make more sense to force adoption of GPT, which entails adoption of UEFI, than to force adoption of 4K sectors? I was thinking that adoption of native 4K would allow for faster adoption than waiting for the entire world to adopt UEFI. Do you expect the industry to retain 512B emulation indefinitely?

 

IDEMA has created a standard for native 4K drives, called (very imaginatively) 4K Native, or 4Kn. I can't say that anyone is planning on implementing that standard, but the option certainly exists.

Also, Anandtech's article on the subject seems to imply that we will in fact see native 4K drives in the future, although not nearly as soon as I had assumed:

And on that note, expect to see similar launches from everyone else within the next year. The last IDEMA plan called for everyone to have 4K-sector drives by 2011, so everyone should be launching within the next year here. Everyone using 512B emulation is going to run in to the same teething issues with Win 5.x – so while other vendors may handle things slightly differently, ultimately everyone is going to be compensating for Win 5.x in some manner (in case it hasn’t been made clear here, these guys would be ecstatic for Win 5.x to go away quickly).

 

Farther down the road will be the exposure of 4K-sectors to the operating system itself. Linux and Win 6.x are set (and we believe that Mac OS X is too), the only limit right now is the desire to do a phased transition to make thing easier for legacy users. Since 4K-sector drives won’t work on Win 5.x at all, drive manufacturers can’t put them on the market so long as there’s a significant legacy base. 2014 – the year that extended support ends for WinXP – looks like a good year to finally complete the move to 4K sectors.

 

[cwr]

out of curiosity, do any of the other advanced format/4K sector drives have the ability to be jumpered?

 

every store i've called (in my city) is out of stock of the WD drives and won't have any more in for around 3-4 weeks. without paying the postage of about ~$40 my only other option is to use either a seagate or samsung. running a 4K sector drive as a parity drive will be painfully slow i imagine

[Joe L.]

out of curiosity, do any of the other advanced format/4K sector drives have the ability to be jumpered?

 

every store i've called (in my city) is out of stock of the WD drives and won't have any more in for around 3-4 weeks. without paying the postage of about ~$40 my only other option is to use either a seagate or samsung. running a 4K sector drive as a parity drive will be painfully slow i imagine

Unless you are writing lots of small files odds are you would not notice at all.

[cwr]

out of curiosity, do any of the other advanced format/4K sector drives have the ability to be jumpered?

 

every store i've called (in my city) is out of stock of the WD drives and won't have any more in for around 3-4 weeks. without paying the postage of about ~$40 my only other option is to use either a seagate or samsung. running a 4K sector drive as a parity drive will be painfully slow i imagine

Unless you are writing lots of small files odds are you would not notice at all.

 

oh sweet! thanks

[lionelhutz]

out of curiosity, do any of the other advanced format/4K sector drives have the ability to be jumpered?

 

every store i've called (in my city) is out of stock of the WD drives and won't have any more in for around 3-4 weeks. without paying the postage of about ~$40 my only other option is to use either a seagate or samsung. running a 4K sector drive as a parity drive will be painfully slow i imagine

Unless you are writing lots of small files odds are you would not notice at all.

 

Yes, what Joe posted. Makes very little difference on large file writes. Samsung does have an issue where it does not write data if there is a HDD query going on at the same time and must have it's firmware upgraded before trusting it. I belive there is a thread about them in the Hardware sub-forum.

 

Peter

 

[kapperz]

Just to chime in on this. I have two of the WDEARS 1.5TB running on unRaid 4.6-final. When I found out about the jumper I spent a day going though the process of adding the jumper, zeroing/formatting the drive, pre-clearing, and rebuilding from parity to set the system up correctly. I was unsuccessful and have read that others had troubles if they didn't add the jumper before the first format.

 

So, I wasted a Saturday and let unRaid rebuild the drive (without the jumper). I might not be running at peak speed, but my rig works perfectly as far as I know.