Future Disk Sector Sizes

R

rob34

I was just reading this article about the move from 512 byte sectors on hard drives to 4k sectors. I thought that this type of hardware change would just require a change to the filesystem, but it says that Linux kernels built after September 2009 would work with the new disks. I read through the release notes for FreeBSD 8.0 and did not find anything about the sector size of a disk.

Is this something that the FreeBSD community should be concerned about?

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/why-new-hard-disks-might-not-be-much-fun-for-xp-users.ars
 
UFS supports large sector sizes for ages. If you wish to test it - you may create graid3 array of 3 disks. It will give you sector size of 1K. For 5 drives - 2K. Recently there was added option to create RAID3 arrays with any bigger sector size.

But except file system code there are a lot of other places where large sectors should be supported: BIOS, partition table, boot code, ... May be you will have to update BIOS or switch to GPT, or ... Difficult to say for sure until such drives produced.
 
I think the issue is more what the drive presents itself to the OS as. I have a few of the new drives and using diskinfo it still claims to be a 512b sector. The important thing is making sure your partition boundaries are aligned on 4K increments. I'm guessing that once WinXP drops off the map they might be able to go native with larger sector sizes since Vista/Win7 support it.
 
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