Char Jackson wrote:
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.


There are various tables around. Example here.

http://www.wdc.com/global/products/f...d=7&language=1

They really don't need to do that for smaller drives.
It's totally unnecessary. Which is why I'm unhappy to see
500GB drives that way. My 250GB drives were the last smooth
ones I owned.

Paul