H. Peter Anvin wrote:
This is certainly a problem. This one is bad for performance in general and is based on completely outdated DOS conventions. It should have been fixed ages ago by aligning to power-of-two boundaries, of at least 64K I would say. I believe Vista uses 1 MB boundaries.
Speaking of alignment, when people were sending me 1K-sector demonstration drives, they were making a big deal about even versus odd alignment. Using the standard 512b sector interface on a 1K-sector disk causes RMW as you expect -- but depending on the disk, the 1K may begin on an odd sector rather than an even sector, because historically partitions were often laid out on odd-numbered boundaries and/or offset by one due to the boot sector.
I can't say whether 1K drives are out there in production, or going to make it into production, but Seagate was making a stink and sending out samples, even asking me to present at IDEMA.
However it is my -hope- that the industry goes straight to 4K sector drives, and drops this even/odd nonsense. 4K-aligned should start at zero, and anything else is uncivilized.
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