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Old December 16th 05, 05:14 AM posted to comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
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Default New hard disk architectures

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage YKhan wrote:
They're talking about integrating flash with hard disks, as well as
increasing the sector size from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes.


Revamping Hard Disk Architecture
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1901955,00.asp


This has been around for some time. The flash does not really help,
unless you write very littel to disk. Personally I think SRAM
and batteries are a better choice, also because flash has relatively
low number of write cycles before it breaks. Not so bad with a disk
mapped 1:1 to flash (e.g. because it is entirely flash), but a serious
problem if a small flash has to buffer all writes to a large disk.
Maybe they are just trtying to create disks that break after 2
years or so...
Note that SRAM+battery has been around for at least a deacde in more
expensive RAID controllers, so the basic idea is old.

As to 4096 Byte sectors, I frankly do not see the point. Multi-sector
transfer stream more than 512 bytes on one go already. Clustering also
provides the possibility to use larger than 512Byte as allocatioon
unit.

I think this is mainly some HDD vendor trying to make themselves
more interesting to a public that does not really understand what
they are talking about.

Arno