Michael DeMan wrote:
The WD 1TB 'enterprise' drives are still 512 sector size and safe to
use, who knows though, maybe they just started shipping with 4K sector
size as I write this e-mail?
Another annoying thing with the whole 4K sector size, is what happens
when you need to replace drives next year, or the year after? That
part has me worried on this whole 4K sector migration thing more than
what to buy today. Given the choice, I would prefer to buy 4K sector
size now, but operating system support is still limited. Does anybody
know if there any vendors that are shipping 4K sector drives that have
a jumper option to make them 512 size? WD has a jumper, but is there
explicitly to work with WindowsXP, and is not a real way to dumb down
the drive to 512. I would presume that any vendor that is shipping 4K
sector size drives now, with a jumper to make it 'real' 512, would be
supporting that over the long run?
Changing the sector size (if it's possible at all) would require a
reformat of the drive.
On SCSI disks which support it, you do it by changing the sector size on
the relevant mode select page, and then sending a format-unit command to
make the drive relayout all the sectors.
I've no idea if these 4K sata drives have any such mechanism, but I
would expect they would.
BTW, I've been using a pair of 1TB Hitachi Ultrastar for something like
18 months without any problems at all. Of course, a 1 year old disk
model is no longer available now. I'm going to have to swap out for
bigger disks in the not too distant future.
--
Andrew Gabriel
_______________________________________________
zfs-discuss mailing list
zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
