Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 16 Mar 2009 09:27:27 -0700 | From | "H. Peter Anvin" <> | Subject | Re: ATA support for 4k sector size |
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Greg Freemyer wrote: > If the reported geometry of these drives was changed to have sectors / > track be a multiple of 8, wouldn't that fix most of the issues. > > ie. If the drive were to report 56 sectors per track, then a > traditional partitioning tool would start the first partition as > sector 56 and a Vista like partitioning tool would place the first > partition at sector 2048. Both would have the same 4K sector > alignment. > > If my logic is sound, anyway to get this recommendation upstream to > hardware manufacturers. It seems like an almost trivial change for > them. > > FYI: It sounds to me like partitioning tools should totally drop > efforts to align with cylinders, instead they should start asking what > the unit of atomic read/writes is at the physical layer and if any > offsets are needed to align the partition with the atomic write areas. > > That would fit better for both SSD technology and for this 4K sectors > issue than trying to continue to support cylinders at all.
As long as BIOSes played along with it (which some of them may not do -- remember the geometry that matters is the one reported by the BIOS) However, it definitely would be a major step in the right direction, as it would let *most* systems Do The Right Thing instead of weirdly misaligning the partitions and trying to cope with that.
-hpa
-- H. Peter Anvin, Intel Open Source Technology Center I work for Intel. I don't speak on their behalf.
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