On Thu, 09 Aug 2012 16:38:56 -0400, Paul wrote:

The latest drives are 4096 byte physical/512 byte logical,
otherwise known as "512e" or 512 byte emulated drives. Seagate
does read/modify/write operations, so at the user level, it
still looks like a 512 byte sector that an older OS can use. But
such a scheme exacts a performance penalty.

I'm surprised to learn that the OS knows or cares about such low level
details. I had expected the IDE interface to hide (abstract) all of
that from the OS.