> Now the new multi-TB hard drives have 4096-byte physical sectors, at > least some of them try to act as if sector size were 512 bytes.
They can only do that if they are less than 2 TB. If bigger than that, they require GPT and don't even try to emulate 512-byte sectors. The emulation also slows things down quite a bit, since it always stores things on the disk in 4k chunks. Even if you tell it to read or write a single 512 byte sector, the disk actually reads and/or writes 4k. > But these hard disks are big, well above the limit or comfort limit > of FAT32 file system, but FreeDOS could run in or be able to access > a FAT32 partition. Exactly. And at least some portion of a FAT partition (be it FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, or even exFAT) can actually be located above the 2 TB limit of MBR-type (32-bit LBA) partitioning, so in that case would require GPT. > Next step up from 4096 bytes could be 8k, 16k ... As Czerno stated, there's probably not a real need for anything more than 4k in the near-term, though there probably ultimately will be. FWIW, in my USB drivers, I've been working on GPT support (it will mount and assign drive letters to all of the FAT partitions of a GPT-partitioned USB disk even if the OS itself doesn't support GPT). I'm also adding support for USB CD/DVD drives, including the ability to mount FAT32-formatted DVD-RAMs (which have a 2k sector size), effectively allowing them to be used as giant optical floppies. Note that this will only work with DVD-RAMs (not any other type of CD/DVD format, which can't be formatted with FAT like DVD-RAMs can) and also only works if the OS supports 2k sectors (which, at least currently, excludes FreeDOS). Just letting you know some of the things that are in the pipeline for USB, though still a ways from being released. Still have a lot of work to do before the next USB release, and not a lot of time to devote. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dive into the World of Parallel Programming! The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. Take a look and join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
