That's good info on the ESE brain cramps.  I'm sure that'll rear it's head
as these drives become more prevalent.

 - WJR


On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 12:16, Ben Scott <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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
>
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