> - what are the benefits of these new drives? Speed, temperature, > reliability? It is purely higher density. A longer physical sector means less percentage of the disk is "wasted" on metadata. This benefits the manufacturer mostly, so they can claim more capacity with less cost (but more credibly than the far more slimy trick of LCD manufacturers who are going to ever more extreme landscape ratios to claim a longer diagonal with less pixels). >From the user/filesystem point iof view it is not a positive thing, but since the 4BSD FFS introduced 4KiB blocks (a very bad idea) and intel and others followed throught with alrge 4KiB pages that has been largely irrelevant. Also it seems that few people are aware that other device types have large sectors, as CDs have 2KiB sectors, DVDs have 32KiB, BDRs have 64KiB sectors (and both simulate 2KiB sectors), and SSDs can have 256KiB sectors (or rather "erase blocks", I think that they can read in smaller units than that). > - what specific HD models are truely 4k for purchase right > now? I'm on the market for a bunch of 2Tb drives, what is a > good choice? These are two completely unrelated questions, and the second is sort of irrelevant because there are so few manufacturers and thus models that one has to buy all of them. Except of course for those who fill their arrays with disks from the same brand, model and even shipping carton, as they know better. As to the first, there have been a few discussions in the past on vsarious Linux mailing lists etc, but the list of models changes as manufacturers change firmware and "truely" is thus a somewhat elastic concept dependent on revision not just model. > - what options do I need when creating my raid6 array and xfs > filesystem to fully take advantage of 4k sectors? Some recent posts to this mailing list give those. I would add also large inodes (2Kib), to alleviate the big downside of 4KiB sectors for small files. _______________________________________________ xfs mailing list xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs
