What is the deal with hard drive technology moving to 4K sectors, vs. 512 bytes? Are 4K sector disk

Posted by Chris W. Rea on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Chris W. Rea
Published on 2010-04-20T00:07:49Z Indexed on 2010/04/20 0:14 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 604

Filed under:

hard-drive

|

storage

|

Technology

|

sectors

|

4k-sectors

I've noticed that some Western Digital hard drives are now sporting 4K sectors, that is, the sectors are larger: 4096 bytes vs. the actual de facto standard of 512 bytes. So:

What's the big deal with 4K sectors? Is it marketing hype, or a real advantage?
Why should somebody building a new PC care, or not, about 4K sectors?
Why is this transition taking place now? Why didn't it happen sooner?
Are there things to look out for when buying a 4K sector hard drive? e.g. incompatibility?
Anything else we should know about 4K sectors?

© Super User or respective owner

Related posts about hard-drive

Move smaller hard drive to partition on a larger hard drive

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
My parents bought a new hard drive for a laptop that I've owned for several years. It's much larger than the current one, so I plan on splitting it up to dual boot it with Ubuntu. I have no problem with partitioning a drive (I always keep a LiveCD handy), but my question is this: how can I go about… >>> More
Using an ATA-100 Hard Drive with a Thermaltake BlacX External Hard Drive Dock

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
Is it possible for a Thermaltake BlacX HDD Dock to connect to and recognize an ATA-100 Hard Drive? I know that the specifications for the BlacX say that it only supports SATA & SATAII, but I was hoping for one of three things: 1) for it to still work even though it isn't supported 2) for there… >>> More
Copy the contents of one hard drive partition to anohter hard drive partition

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
I have made a C++ program which can copy the whole hardrive partition to another hardrive partition, but now I am looking forward for the program which can only copy the contents of one hardrive partiton to another hardrive partition. >>> More
backup hard drive image on external hard drive for Windows 7

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
Hello, I am looking for a backup tool for Windows 7, that will allow me to backup my laptop’s hard drive on an external hard drive as an exact image. In a case of a problem with the main hard drive, I would like just to swap the drives and to continue to work using the backup hard drive. Thanks >>> More
Copy the contents of one hard drive partition to anohter hard drive partition

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have made a C++ program which can copy the whole hardrive partition to another hardrive partition, but now I am looking forward for the program which can only copy the contents of one hardrive partiton to another hardrive partition. >>> More

Related posts about storage

Oracle Storage Implementation Boot Camp: ZFS Storage Appliance and Flash

as seen on Oracle Blogs - Search for 'Oracle Blogs'
Oracle Storage Implementation Boot Camp: ZFS Storage Appliance and Flash Thursday 20th September 9.30 – 16.30 … >>> More
Slow NFS and GFS2 performance

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
Recently I've designed and configured a 4 node cluster for a webapp that does lots of file handling. The cluster have been broken down into 2 main roles, webserver and storage. Each role is replicated to a second server using drbd in active/passive mode. The webserver does a NFS mount of the data… >>> More
Moving data files failing

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
Trying to migrate data from C: to D: via the SBS console is failing. The wizard starts running but drops out in the first few seconds. I'll post the full logs, but the important lines appear to be as follows: An exception of type 'Type: System.IO.FileNotFoundException, mscorlib, Version=2… >>> More
Mounting Replicated Gluster Multi-AZ Storage

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
I have Replicated Gluster Storage which is used by Auto scaling Servers. Both, Auto scaling and Storage are allocated in two Availability zones. Gluster: Number of Bricks: 4 x 2 = 8 Transport-type: tcp Bricks: Brick1: gluster01:/storage/1a # Zone A Brick2: gluster02:/storage/1b # Zone B Brick3:… >>> More
On Server Disk Storage VS SAN Storage

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
Hello, I am looking at buying three servers, and trying to figure out which storage solution makes the most sense in terms of performance and cost. Total budget is around: $10,000. OPTION 1: Dell servers with RAID 10 (4 Drives) each 7200RPM SAS 500GB, for a total capacity of 1TB. Each server is… >>> More