On Sat, 14 Jan 2012 "Michael B. Brutman" wrote :
> As far as 4K blocks go, I wouldn't worry about it too much. 512 byte
> sectors will be supported either natively or by emulation in the drive
> itself for a long time to come - at least 5 to 10 years. Too many
> existing systems depend on a 512 byte sector and manufacturers are more
> likely to demand reasonable 512 byte emulation from the hard drive
> makers than to do anything themselves.
I understand this is your and some others' opinion (J.R. Ellis ?) but it is
not an exact evaluation of the problem - sure, stand alone SATA/eSATA disks
should continue to provide 512-byte sector emulation for some time (though that
5 to 10 years estimate seems rather optimistic... time will tell); but the
trend for external appliances is to present 4096-byte sectors ONLY.
The appliance I own is a curious case : the actual disk inside is a 1 Terabyte
SATA having standard 512 b sectors, but for some reason we can only try to
guess - standardisation among a range of disk sizes ? directions from Redmond ?
- the USB/SATA converter ("bridge") is programmed to present 4096 byte sectors
at the USB interface. And this is not changeable, for lack of the specs from
either Iomega or the maker of the bridge itself (PLX, formely Oxbridge in this
instance).
While this is ridiculous, and sad, bet you most new disk appliances on the
market are going to conform to this standard soon.
Which is a reason the DOS kernel ought to support max_sector_size=4K at least
as an special option, IMVHO. I am aware of a set of *commercial* patches to
MSDOS which purportedly brings the support into that other DOS kernel (and even
in Windows 9x). Having no revenue any more I haven't been able to try R. Loew's
patches.
Regards
--
Czerno
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