Re: Support for 4KB sectors size disk ?

[Tobias Nygren <tnn%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:40:32 +0000
David Laight <david%l8s.co.uk@localhost> wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 04:45:24PM -0500, Arnaud Lacombe wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I quickly asked on IRC, but didn't get an answer. Do we have native
> > support for disk with 4KB sector size in non 512B-legacy mode ? These
> > disks start to be available in retail (in particular the WD Green
> > series with cache of 64M) and are quite attractive.
> 
> Does windows support these disks ?
> Are they bootable ? If so where does the boot code sit ?
> 
> In which case what does the MBR partition information look like ?
> Especially when there are extended partitions ?

I've yet to get my hands on one of those, but as I understand it, the
disk's firmware provides transparent 512-byte legacy translation, and
this is the way the drive boots up. So, we should be able to use those
WD disks out of the box.
By making sure file system blocks are aligned to physical 4KB boundaries
you can still tap in to most of the performance benefits.

-Tobias