Until someone demonstrates otherwise I will continue to state that 4K native drives are still not on the open market. And the reason for this is quite logical if given a moment of thought. Advanced Format 512e drives, drives with 4K native sectors but 512B sectors presented to the host, fully accomplished the goal of the spinning disk drive manufacturers. That goal was simply to pack more data per platter, on average about 11% more, by reducing the amount of bits consumed for ECC. I.e. they can sell a lager capacity drive using the same hardware as a native 512 byte/sector drive, or with some drive capacities, reduce the number of platters while maintaining the same capacity, thus reducing component and production cost, and hopefully retail price. The physical sector size presented to the host is irrelevant to the drive manufacturers, given the singular goal above. Switching to a native 4K sector does not benefit the manufacturers. At the current time it actually will cause them tremendous problems. If they were to put 4K native drives on the market today, many millions of Windows XP users would buy the drives, ignoring, or simply not reading far enough to find the "4K native" warnings. They then return the drives when they don't work, causing great ill will, bad reviews tarnishing manufacturers' reputations, and decreasing repeat business. Thus native 4K drives will not be on the open market until the manufacturers are comfortable that most legacy machines have been retired, eliminating the possibility of the scenario above. The first units of native 4K drives will be, or possibly already have been, to OEMs who exercise control over which systems and disk arrays in which the drives will be installed. This prevents such a problem in the enterprise space, as purchasers typically rely on their vendors to do compatibility matching. Enterprise OEMs have long maintained such product compatibility databases. -- Stan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
