On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 7:12 PM, Marco Peereboom <slash@peereboom.us> wrote:
quoted text
> yes
>
> On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 12:30:46AM +0100, Robert wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I just read [1,2] that Western Digital (and probably others) will start
>> to sell disks with an internal block size of 4KB instead of 512 byte.
>>
>> The article mentions that this might lead to a considerable performance
>> impact if the  logical partition alignment is not in sync with the
>> physical one ("e.g. if partitions starts at sector 63 wich is not a
>> multiple of 4KB" [1]):
>> "If a block of 4KB should be written, which is (logically) aligned, but
>> physically in fact 2 sectors, then both physical sectors will need to be
>> read, partially modified and then written back which leads to a serious
>> performance hit." [1]
>>
>> Any comments from someone who has a good knowledge of this area? Will
>> this affect OpenBSD?
>>
>> regards,
>> Robert
>>
>> [1] (german)
>>
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Festplatten-mit-4-KByte-Sektorgroesse-
887759.html
quoted text
>> [2] http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/whitepapers/en/2579-771430.pdf
>
>

4K sectors themselves should work ok as we already do that for ffs on
CD media. Which works the last I checked. Ensuring alignment on blocks
will have to be checked. It sounds like some should donate a few of
these 4K devices to the project so we can fix any issues asap.

.... Ken