4K Sector Drives Are Coming

If there’s one thing that forces people into using newer operating systems, it’s when only the latest OS offerings support current hardware.

In first and second quarter 2011, hard drives are going to start shipping that use 4K sectors instead of the now-ancient 512 byte. For Windows XP users this presents an issue because that OS was released before the 4K sector spec was finalized.

For those of you that remember the time when you had to use special software (Maxtor MaxBlast comes to mind) in order for an OS to recognize hard drives over 512MB in size, the scenario here is similar to that – except this time it’s not to recognize the full size of the disk, but rather simply to access it. In addition, using a 4K sector HDD in 512 byte “mode” will slow the drive access down significantly.

This new 4K sector hard disk is going to industry-wide. What this means is that the 512 byte sector HDDs are going to be completely phased out, and it will most likely happen very quickly.

Which OSes are natively “4k aware”?

Microsoft: Windows Vista, Windows 7

Apple: OS X Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard

Linux: The kernel released after September 2009

What can you do to prepare for the future?

If you’re running one of the OSes above, you don’t have to worry about anything since the OS natively supports the upcoming 4k sector HDDs.

If you intend on sticking with XP, 2000, an older Mac or a pre-2009 Linux kernel for a few more years, it’s in your best interest to buy a few spare HDDs now. This will save you from having to hunt for them later once the 512 byte sector drives are phased out completely.

Once the 512 byte sector HDDs are off the shelves, they’ll most likely never be coming back.

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Paul
So how much did Micro$oft pay to have this done?

http://www.menga.net Rich Menga
Cut the crap with the childish “Micro$oft”. The entire industry has agreed that 4K sector drives are the way to go and are doing it. Microsoft, Apple and Linux. All of them.

David M
Rich,
For those who don’t know, I think the definition of a sector needs to be described. Its really basic for geeks but not necessarily all readers of this page.

http://www.menga.net Rich Menga
Put in simple terms:
“A disk sector is the smallest unit of storage that can be accessed on a disk.”
http://www.liutilities.com/products/winbackup/backupterms/disksector/

David M
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_sector
Bill McIntyre
BTW… Newegg has been selling these new WD HDDs since January, starting with 1TB WD10EARS. The last I heard (or read) was that all operating systems would still only see 512B sectors via emulation by the drive controller, and “true” 4K sectors would not likely be exposed until 2014 (the year extended support for XP ends) or later. The problem w/XP (& a lot of disk cloning software presently) is due to misaligned partitions. This won’t destroy any data, but the disk will be a lot slower. In addition to adding jumpers to offset the partition, Western Digital also provides an alignment utility (preferred method) that realigns the partition(s) correctly on XP. If you use cloning software on Vista or W7, you’ll likely have to use the alignment utility unless the disk clone software manufactures have finally updated their software. AnandTech did a great 2-page write up on this last December here
Bill McIntyre
AnandTech article:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3691
Bill
And yet a couple more articles on the topic:
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/why-new-hard-disks-might-not-be-much-fun-for-xp-users.ars
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2010/03/10/wd_targets_windows_xp_4k/
David Kennedy
Seriously. A Microsoft conspiracy??? Yeah, why can’t Microsoft anticipate every advance in technology and write their OS so that it will always support new hardware??? (sarcasm)
Phil
So what does this mean for a NAS? Do the cheaper ones (all I can afford) operate independently of the operating system using some sort of hardware/firmware configuration to access the hard drive and present it across the network or is the network transport invisible to the operating system and the OS acts directly on the hard drives as it would to a local drive?
Don
NAS devices still have an OS. Most likely Linux. So they will need to be upgraded to support the newer drives if they don’t already support them.