From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261240AbTJ1Sk5 (ORCPT ); Tue, 28 Oct 2003 13:40:57 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261309AbTJ1Sk5 (ORCPT ); Tue, 28 Oct 2003 13:40:57 -0500 Received: from tmr-02.dsl.thebiz.net ([216.238.38.204]:1798 "EHLO gatekeeper.tmr.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261240AbTJ1Skz (ORCPT ); Tue, 28 Oct 2003 13:40:55 -0500 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Path: gatekeeper.tmr.com!davidsen From: davidsen@tmr.com (bill davidsen) Newsgroups: mail.linux-kernel Subject: Re: Blockbusting news, results end Date: 28 Oct 2003 18:30:43 GMT Organization: TMR Associates, Schenectady NY Message-ID: References: <785F348679A4D5119A0C009027DE33C105CDB3CA@mcoexc04.mlm.maxtor.com> X-Trace: gatekeeper.tmr.com 1067365843 27936 192.168.12.62 (28 Oct 2003 18:30:43 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@tmr.com Originator: davidsen@gatekeeper.tmr.com Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org In article <785F348679A4D5119A0C009027DE33C105CDB3CA@mcoexc04.mlm.maxtor.com>, Mudama, Eric wrote: | | | > -----Original Message----- | > From: Norman Diamond | > It is really hard to imagine a physical sector still being | > 512B because the inter-sector gaps would take some huge | > multiple of the space occupied by the sectors. | | We measure these gaps in nanoseconds. They're not that huge. But yes, | moving to a larger standard sector size would get you a significantly larger | disk drive built from the same parts. Given that we did that back in the CP/M days (late 70's) on floppy, and with MFM, RLL and finally SCSI drives in the 70's, I would hope that current drives use large sectors since the drive now has local cache and doesn't need a fancy driver to do the caching! | > I'm sure the physical sectors are not 512B. | | I'm sure you're wrong. | | I'd imagine that since Seagate and WD and Maxtor are constantly duking it | out to release the next generation of capacity, and we all wind up producing | nearly-identical products when all is said and done, that they're using 512B | data sectors also. Given that the IRG is fixed size regardless of sector size, I certainly hope I misread what you say or you are incorrect. The difference between 512B and 4KB sectors should be about 20-40% added capacity per track (seven IRG sizes). I would expect large sectors would be standard. We used to diddle interleave when formatting as well, until we put full track caching in the device driver. -- bill davidsen CTO, TMR Associates, Inc Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.