4K Native hard drives

[SandYFan]

So apparently hard drive technology is currently making the move from 512-byte sized sectors on hard drives to 4096-byte size sectors.

Does anyone know where I can buy a true 4K native drive? There are a lot out there that mimic it, but I've been unable to find a true, not masked 4K hard drive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format

TIA.

[Uncle Ted]

So apparently hard drive technology is currently making the move from 512-byte sized sectors on hard drives to 4096-byte size sectors.

Does anyone know where I can buy a true 4K native drive? There are a lot out there that mimic it, but I've been unable to find a true, not masked 4K hard drive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format

TIA.

Frys or MicroCenter.

Wait, no Fry's MicroCenter in Utah? Try New Egg...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136783

You get a little more space with AF:

4k-adv-format-sectors.jpg

but it seems to me the file system in your OS is most likely going to waste your savings and then some. Let's say you have a file that is one byte long. That file will map to a disk sector. If your sector is 512 bytes long then you waste 511 bytes for that file. If your sector is 4096 bytes long then you waste 4095 bytes. Also, there are performance issues as well since your OS will have to read that entire 4096 sector to retrieve that one little byte which takes up more room in the OS's "buffer cache". Maybe that is why they recommend these drives for digital audio/video storage applications.

[Uncle Ted]

OK, I take about what I said about performance...

The performance loss in Windows XP was negligible in every scenario, which is great news for those still clinging onto it. There’s even evidence to show that the new disk will be faster under XP than Windows 7 (compare Windows 7 performance in one graph to Windows XP in another). Naturally, in 4KB reads and writes there’s a huge performance advantage for the newer 4K Advanced Format disk, but at the same time the write latency has taken a hit. In our tests, we found the jumper workaround for Windows XP to work perfectly fine, and we didn’t have many issues with setting up partitions on the disk either.


Disks based on 4K Advanced Format are a natural evolution to the old 512B models, so to some extent, 'should I get a 4K AF disk' is a moot point - it's what the industry is moving to in order to give us more density per platter and cheaper (or at least no more expensive). As higher capacity and increased areal density often results in better performance, there's a speed benefit too.


The caveat is that you won’t see those benefits just yet – the standard is being introduced this year so that it can enable disks of the future to deliver these advantages. We'll have to wait to see whether the 4K Advanced Format change will make a tangible difference.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/04/01/the-facts-4k-advanced-format-hard-disks/6

I still wonder about the issue with wasted space.

Of course, in order to make drives with lots of space we are going to need to go to 4K sectors soon or later.

[SandYFan]

Of course, in order to make drives with lots of space we are going to need to go to 4K sectors soon or later.

That's the big thing. I found a couple, including Western Digital's Green Caviar models. Thanks for the help.