On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 10:33 PM, Mike Gill <[email protected]> wrote: > Don’t know anything about this yet, but couldn’t you just wipe it and > install Win7 fresh or from a prepared image? Or is this a hardware issue?
It's a little of both. From what I've read: PC hard disks have used 512 byte blocks since the dawn of time (defined on the PC platform as 1 Jan 1980). With modern ginormous files and drives, that's inefficient, so they're switching to 4 KiB blocks. Since a lot of hardware and software isn't compatible with that, the industry has come up with something called "512 byte block emulation", or "512e". This presents 512 byte blocks to the host, but the drive still uses 4 KiB blocks internally. As a result, you pay a performance penalty if the host does I/O that doesn't fall neatly on a 4 KiB boundary. It will still work, but the emulation layer has to perform two block I/O ops where the host only asked for one. By aligning one's partitions on 4 KiB boundaries, you avoid the performance hit. Or so I'm given to understand. There are also a bunch of weird complications. For example, ESE (the Microsoft database engine that powers Exchange, Active Directory, and more) apparently has a fatal brain cramp if the block size of the disk changes vs what it was at creation. So if you move from one disk to another, everything using ESE explodes. There's a hotfix for that. "If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would have destroyed civilization." (origin unknown) -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
