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| HDD's With 4Kb Block Support | |
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J Grant
United Kingdom
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Posts 5
09 Mar 2010 18:40
| Sauce... EXTERNAL LINK
Hi, long time lurker, decided to post! Back in 1989, I had a 280Mb SCSI HDD that I connected to my A590
unfortunatly it would not work at the time. Reason being it was
low level formated to 256 Byte blocks. The Amiga likes em in 512 Byte flavour. eventually around 1992 I found a bit of software that would allow me to low level format the drive and use it! Begining of next year, all drives will be produced with 4Kb blocks...
Will the NatAmi be able to support this new flavour??
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Marcel Verdaasdonk
Netherlands
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Posts 2100
09 Mar 2010 21:11
| The hardware probably will, question is if the software would like it. Not all my own questions around HDD have been replied too.
Some have even been flat out ignored.
So long you have a IDE interface it ought to work, no matter what is in the casing.
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Thomas Richter
Germany
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Posts 699
09 Mar 2010 21:21
| Marcel Verdaasdonk wrote:
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The hardware probably will, question is if the software would like it.
Not all my own questions around HDD have been replied too.
Some have even been flat out ignored.
So long you have a IDE interface it ought to work, no matter what is in the casing.
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The FFS supports (almost) arbitrary block sizes of a power of two. The limit is the underlying device driver. Good ones (like the omniscsi) support also 256 byte sections, and with CDroms, obviously also 2048 byte sectors. I don't think 4K sectors would be a problem for a well-developed device driver.So long,
Thomas
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Team Chaos Leader
USA
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Posts 1199
09 Mar 2010 23:24
| I have some new 4K block drives. I had to format them under my brother's Windows7 in order for them to be correctly aligned. Then I attached them to my WindowsXP box which is the slave of my A1200T. I donno about FFS/OFS/SFS/PFS/AFS/FFS2 compatibility because these drives are SATA and I have no SATA on my 1992 A1200 motherboard.
There is no SATA on Natami motherboard either.
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Thomas Richter
Germany
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Posts 699
10 Mar 2010 19:31
| Team Chaos Leader wrote:
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I have some new 4K block drives. I had to format them under my brother's Windows7 in order for them to be correctly aligned. Then I attached them to my WindowsXP box which is the slave of my A1200T.
I donno about FFS/OFS/SFS/PFS/AFS/FFS2 compatibility because these drives are SATA and I have no SATA on my 1992 A1200 motherboard.
There is no SATA on Natami motherboard either.
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They also work "incorrectly aligned", just slow. )-:The Linux fdisk utility got a new option for that, however. The point we should probably explain to others is that this drive "fakes" its block size. If the device would report blocks of 4K in first case, alignment wouldn't been an issue (just won't work under windows ;-). Instead, the drive "lies" and returns a block size of 512 bytes. To write a 512 byte block to a 4K block hardware, the drive obviously first needs a read of the full 4K block, a modification of the altered part in memory, and a full 4K block write, thus is inefficient. *Unless* the Os writes blocks in a continuous way, and aligned to the drives internal organization. So long,
Thomas
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Christian Kummerow
Germany
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Posts 171
10 Mar 2010 20:15
| Thomas Richter wrote:
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*Unless* the Os writes blocks in a continuous way, and aligned to the drives internal organization.
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Happend this if a FS Blocksize of 4096 is set?
I read about 10% speedloss by this Emulation.
But Natami is limited anyway to IDE Speed.
IDE Drives has 2-8 MB of cache..
SATA Drives has 8-32MB cache that should help a bit for this
problem. Questionable if at all IDE drives with 4kB/Blocks are produced,
maybe in short time IDE is completly from marked.
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Thomas Richter
Germany
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Posts 699
10 Mar 2010 20:39
| Christian Kummerow wrote:
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Thomas Richter wrote:
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*Unless* the Os writes blocks in a continuous way, and aligned to the drives internal organization.
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Happend this if a FS Blocksize of 4096 is set?
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Well, not necessarily. The drive cannot know whether the filing system is writing data of a block, or the data just happens to be continuous by accident.But besides data blocks, the FS would also need to write administration blocks, and they are typically not part of a continuous data stream. Christian Kummerow wrote:
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I read about 10% speedloss by this Emulation.
But Natami is limited anyway to IDE Speed.
IDE Drives has 2-8 MB of cache..
SATA Drives has 8-32MB cache that should help a bit for this
problem.
Questionable if at all IDE drives with 4kB/Blocks are produced,
maybe in short time IDE is completly from marked.
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The market for IDE is almost dead by now already. I remember having read a story from people trying to get a new large IDE disk, and all they got from an (obviously dubious) dealer was a "recycled" drive from a computer scrap dealer. )-:I have only one IDE drive left here lying around, and it has a couple of bad sectors - only used for very unimportant data. So long,
Thomas
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Marcel Verdaasdonk
Netherlands
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Posts 2100
10 Mar 2010 20:44
| I have a IDE here with 16MB cache Christian.
And Christian I agree at this rate in two years IDE might be a though to get product.(already is but not when you know wherre too look)
Atleast i have a small stash of them so this will not effect me, but how about everyone else?
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