which new drives use 4 kB sectors?

[Kulin Remailer]

I presume anything over 2 tebibytes will.

Otherwise, I guess I must read the specs for every drive that

I consider buying?



I have a quirky software package that only runs under

NT/2000/XP/2003 but shits itself with Vista or later.

And I don't like kludges, just wanna plug shit in and go.

 

[willbill]

On 15/06/2011 15:33, Kulin Remailer wrote:

Correct. With emphasis on the word *over*

As in *over* 2TB.

Then buy a 500 GB disk. The chances are very high that it has 512 byte
sectors.

And what's the worst that can happen? The 4K sector drives lie to the
OS and claim to be 512 byte sectors. They will be a bit slower
(especially for writing) if your partitions are not aligned, but they
will still work fine.

My hunch at this point is that if there is a culprit,
with 4k sector HDD, it is with 3rd party software
used within more complicated setups within
either Win Vista and/or Win7.

My 2nd hunch is that this guy (Kulin Remailer)
saw my response to Castor Nageur in his thread.
I'll wait until Castor Nageur tries what I suggested
and gets back with how that goes.

Bill

 

[Rod Speed]

I presume anything over 2 tebibytes will.

I did too, until I looked at a Hitachi datasheet which stated
explicitly that one of their 3TB drives in a series which
includes drives smaller than that has 512 byte sectors.

Corse one possibility is that that is an error in the datasheet.

Otherwise, I guess I must read the specs for every drive that
I consider buying?

Not all of them specify that as I discovered after seeing that.

I have a quirky software package that only runs under
NT/2000/XP/2003 but shits itself with Vista or later.

And I don't like kludges, just wanna plug shit in and go.

And the other problem is that drives over 2.2TB have a different problem
and those older OSs just dont have any support for them natively.

 

[larry moe 'n curly]

I have a quirky software package that only runs under

NT/2000/XP/2003 but shits itself with Vista or later.

And I don't like kludges, just wanna plug shit in and go.

I may be wrong, but I believe all hard drives with 64MB caches use 4KB
physical sectors. But even if you can't get drives with 512B sectors,
just use Linux G-Parted to create partitions that are aligned. It's
faster to do this and copy existing partitions to the new drive than
to use alignment software.

 

[Arno]

I presume anything over 2 tebibytes will.

Otherwise, I guess I must read the specs for every drive that

I consider buying?

Yes. For the moment, smaller drives (as the 500GB suggested
by somebody else here) will be safe, but that can change at
any time.

I have a quirky software package that only runs under
NT/2000/XP/2003 but shits itself with Vista or later.

And I don't like kludges, just wanna plug shit in and go.

Have you considered running this software (or rather an image with
NT/2000/XP/2003 and this software) in a VM? I recently
made good experiences with VirtualBox(free). VMware Player (also free)
is a second option, but I don't like it very much.

Arno

 

[Rod Speed]

David Brown wrote

Arno wrote

That implies having a modern OS as the host. Unless the OP is familiar with Linux, it would mean buying a license for
Win7,
installing that and getting familiar with it, the getting familiar with a virtual machine, just so that he could get
his partitions 4K aligned.

Much as I like virtual machines, and see them as a good long-term
solution for inconvenient programs (or inconvenient users like myself,
who prefer XP to Win7), I think buying a 500 GB disk is going to be a
lot easier, a lot cheaper, and a lot faster to get up and running.

Or just buying a drive whose datasheet you trust on the sector size question.

Or use the Acronis ute thats free.

And as I said in another post, a 4K sector disk will work fine with XP, just slightly slower.

Thats not what some of the drive manufacturers claim.

 

[Rod Speed]

David Brown wrote

Rod Speed wrote

If there are any /honest/ 4K sector drives out there, then that might be the case - XP may not be happy with drives
that say they have 4K sectors. But the whole point of lying about it and claiming to be 512 sector drives was to make
them usable with XP (and earlier Windows), even if it risks poor performance on non-Windows systems or newer Windows.

The trouble with that line is that drives bigger than 2.2TB wont work with XP
at all, so there isnt any point in them pretending to have 512 byte sectors.

 

[Rod Speed]

David Brown wrote

Actually, drives bigger than 2.2 TB can work on XP. You have two options - use an MBR partition table and only use
the first 2.2 TB of the disk,

Its unlikely that anyone would buy a 3TB drive to use like that.

or install a GPT disk driver (available from several 3 TB disk manufacturers, I believe).

Yes, but there isnt any point in the drive pretending to have 512 byte sectors in that case.

Whether or not these 3 TB disks still lie about the sector size, I don't know.

I guess one possibility that I didnt consider was where the manufacturer has
a series of drives of say 1,2,3 TB in size, and has the firmware pretend that
the drive has 512 byte sectors for the 1 and 2 TB drives, and chooses to use
the same firmware in the 3TB drive, even tho it wont work natively with XP.

 

[Franc Zabkar]

I presume anything over 2 tebibytes will.

Otherwise, I guess I must read the specs for every drive that

I consider buying?



I have a quirky software package that only runs under

NT/2000/XP/2003 but shits itself with Vista or later.

And I don't like kludges, just wanna plug shit in and go.

Seagate's 4KB-sectored drives transparently handle misalignment issues
in the firmware. Seagate calls it "SmartAlign".

WD provides an alignment jumper for use with legacy OSes such as
Windows XP. This adds a +1 sector offset to each LBA, with the result
that a partition which normally begins at LBA 63 is shifted
transparently to LBA 64. However, this means that only the first
partition is guaranteed to be aligned. Unfortunately, many of WD's
Advanced Format models don't identify themselves as such, which means
that even current OSes may not be able to automatically optimise their
storage devices.

- Franc Zabkar

 

[Mike Tomlinson]

I recently
made good experiences with VirtualBox(free).

+1.

VirtualBox rocks. I'm typing into a Windows VM running on a Linux host
right now.

 

[Arno]

VirtualBox rocks. I'm typing into a Windows VM running on a Linux host
right now.

How are they with supporting current kernels? One thing that
annoys me no end in VmWare (have an Office 2003 in XP
for those cases were customers need editable documents)
is that I have to boot to an older kernel to use it.

Arno

 

[Mike Tomlinson]

How are they with supporting current kernels?

No problems at all on:

[me@box ~]$ uname -r
2.6.34.8-68.fc13.i686.PAE
[me@box ~]$

One thing that
annoys me no end in VmWare (have an Office 2003 in XP
for those cases were customers need editable documents)
is that I have to boot to an older kernel to use it.

Yes, I got absolutely sick of VMWare refusing to rebuild cleanly after a
kernel update. Used Workstation for a long while but decided to try
VirtualBox and haven't looked back.

 

[Mike Tomlinson]

I'm a little unclear on virtual machines. Does VirtualBox running
on Linux and supporting a virtual XP machine need Linux device
drivers or Windows XP device drivers?

XP drivers.

You install XP into the virtual machine just as you would on a normal
PC, and when installation in complete, click on a tool within VirtualBox
which "inserts" a CD image, GuestAdditions,iso, into the CD drive within
XP. This contains the drivers to make XP work properly with the
emulated hardware inside the virtual machine.

Terminology: the host is the one running the virtual machine(s), the
guest is the one being emulated inside the VM.

 

[Joe Pfeiffer]

I'm a little unclear on virtual machines. Does VirtualBox running
on Linux and supporting a virtual XP machine need Linux device
drivers or Windows XP device drivers?

Short answer: XP

Long answer: The host (running Linux) has its own device drivers of
course, in order to support the physical hardware of the real computer.
The virtual machine environment provided by the host includes virtual
"devices", emulated by the VirtualBox environment, that the guest OS
interacts with. So XP uses its device drivers to communicate with its
virtual disk, virtual display (etc).

 

[Arno]

En el art?culo <[email protected]>, Arno <[email protected]>
escribi?:

No problems at all on:

[me@box ~]$ uname -r
2.6.34.8-68.fc13.i686.PAE
[me@box ~]$

One thing that
annoys me no end in VmWare (have an Office 2003 in XP
for those cases were customers need editable documents)
is that I have to boot to an older kernel to use it.

Yes, I got absolutely sick of VMWare refusing to rebuild cleanly after a
kernel update. Used Workstation for a long while but decided to try
VirtualBox and haven't looked back.

Thanks fro the info.

Arno

 

[Arno]

I'm a little unclear on virtual machines. Does VirtualBox running
on Linux and supporting a virtual XP machine need Linux device
drivers or Windows XP device drivers?

*TimDaniels*

Both: Linux drivers for the linux host (main machine) and
XP drivers for the XP guest (virtual machine). What else?

VirtualBox itself does not need device drivers.

Arno