4kiB sectors and W2k?

[pointertovoid]

Hello you all!

Some hard disk drive now use sectors of 4kiB instead of the 512B inherited from a very long time, which lets suppose many Bios, OS, applications will fail as they falsely assume sectors have 512B.

The equivalent thread for W98, citing as well Bios, is there

very informative and interesting, but we better don't pollute it, since disk access differs from 9x.

You guess the interrogation:

How does W2k react to 4kiB sectors? And W2k applications? Are there good Bios? Nt4 and W2k3 users are welcome, hi bro.

[jaclaz]

since disk access differs from 9x.

.... and NT based systems have a HAL (hardware abstraction Layer), thus *anything* the BIOS says is ignored by the OS that re-interrogates everything through device drivers as soon as the real mode part of booting switches to protected mode ......

I would personally take BIOS out of the list of 2K related questions.

A BIOS will either work (or completely fail to) with 4 Kb disk drives, no matter the OS that will be later loaded.....

jaclaz

[pointertovoid]

I certainly agree that the Hal does again what the Bios did, but the Bios has still an influence:

- To start the machine, as you said; not specific to W2k but necessary

- To switch off some parts of the hardware, which aren't switched on again by W2k

So I'm very cautious before ruling out interactions. Just one example: I had a mobo whose Bios apparently didn't setup properly the SMBus that accesses the temperature sensors. W2k didn't neither, even with the proper mobo and chipset drivers. With nVidia and older Ati graphics drivers, all went fine. With newer Ati graphics drivers W2k couldn't boot - but WinMe did. This improved as I added the independent SpeedFan software that reads temperature sensors . My best explanation being that SpeedFan itself configures the SMBus properly.

You know, computers are like explosives. The more you know them, the more you mistrust them.

[jaclaz]

You know, computers are like explosives. The more you know them, the more you mistrust them.

Yep , I would also add the adjective UNSTABLE to the "explosive" substantive.

jaclaz

[Browncoat]

Well, I'm not that savvy, I just popped in the 4ksector drives and all seemed to work,

except windows defrag doesn't seem to like it. Since its just movies and TV,not requiring

great speed, can't remember the exact dialogue box but it wanted me to backup first

before defrag, something about partition info,I'll check it again but the machine is rendering a file

and I'll have to wait to free up the taxed cpu, so i just left it.

EDIT: just ran defrag now [23:00EST] only up to 'Analyze' and the dialogue box didn't come up again,

so I'm just going to leave it because when I copy over the files will end up contiguous anyhow.

Edited February 28, 2012 by Browncoat

[pointertovoid]

...windows defrag doesn't seem to like it...

...when I copy over the files will end up contiguous anyhow.

The excellent Defrag from W2k was offocially known to accept only clusters of 4kiB.

Which could mean eather clusters of 4kiB or 8 sectors, which would then translate into 32kiB clusters.

Could you tell us how is the volume Defrag didn't like, and maybe check a volume with the other size option?

Contiguous files aren't good enough for Windows since W98fe. Windows post-95 have a task that observes what files are loaded at the same time (possibly what file chunks, even before Xp?) and groups them on the disk. This accelerates applications start quite a bit and is a clear superiority of W2k-Xp-etc built-in defragmenter, which competitors don't offer. Competitors do run faster but make a worse job, and each Defrag wants to "correct" what the other did.

[pointertovoid]

I've received and tried my first Hdd with 4kiB sectors, a Hitachi (r.i.p., I had liked them) 7k1000.d of 1TB or Hds721010dle630.

Apparently, it always emulates 512B sectors, and the user can't change that. Do you agree?

That will be a worry over 2TiB because many Windows can't address so many sectors - a hidden reason for bigger sectors.

When formatting it, Ntfs "default cluster size" chose naturally 4kiB, and W2k's Defrag runs on it without complaining.

Hitachi provides a software to align existing volumes so they begin at a 4kiB sector boundary instead of sector 63.

Important when accessing more than 512B, as it avoids to access one 4kiB sector more just for its last 512B.

Typically W2k and Xp would create the first volume at sector 63.

Other manufacturers have a jumper that shifts sector numbers by 1 so W2k and Xp would create the first volume at sector 64.