On Wed, 1 Apr 2009 05:14:54 +0200 frantisek holop <min...@obiit.org> wrote:
> hmm, on Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 05:05:10AM +0200, frantisek holop said > that > > i wonder what will happen when 65536/255/63 is reached, > > what kind of frankenstein translation table will come into life > > just to save c/h/s again. maybe there will come an LBA only age, > > i mean fdisk-wise, not disk-wise, those are already LBA only... > > openbsd could be the first one to nuke c/h/s from the MBR > entirely, replace it with 8 or 16 byte LBA values (4 bytes > currently) and lead the way for terribly huge disks :] > > -f fantisek, Though they could logically do it now, is there a *need* to do this, let alone available hardware? -You're really talking about a personal hacking project with a *very* serious cash requirement to buy the necessary equipment. More importantly, is c/h/s or even LBA even relevant to the new storage system designs? The first is archaic, and the second is a just kludge for the continuance of an archaic concept. Everything we have and use today for storage was built on top of the concepts of rotating media. It is *habit* for all of us to think about things in terms of rotating media. Very soon our habit will become obsolete. It's all storage. How the storage is arranged, designed or implemented is under constant evolution, including natural selection where a new, stronger species can eradicate a weaker species. Originally we had volatile storage (memory). You could call it solid state "RAM" and be correct, but it just as easily could be vacuum tubes. We also created even more volatile and faster storage (cache) implemented closer to the processor. We even made successively faster levels of cache. We created "less volatile" but slower storage (drum, cards, tape, rom, disk, disc, ...). --In my opinion *all* storage is volatile, especially if Nick is around with a Nail Gun (ramset). (; Since we never have enough level 1 cache, we pull from the next level. Since we never have enough cache, we pull from RAM. Since we never have enough RAM, we pull from paging (swap) on disk. Since we never have enough disk, we pull from tape archives. The tricky thing to remember is the next species of "less volatile" storage, will not only replace rotating media, but it is extremely similar to memory/RAM as we currently know it. All of those cool tricks we've learned from the memory/RAM world are generally applicable, but since it is "less volatile" all of the tricks we've learned from the disk/raid/tape world are also applicable. In the biological sense, think about your super fast RAID subsystem mating with your massively interleaved memory subsystem and having offspring with most of the best traits from both parents. Can you imagine trying to access RAM with c/h/s or LBA ? I didn't think so. -- J.C. Roberts
