Jeff Garzik wrote:

Alan Cox wrote:

quoted

I would be interested to know what the disk vendors intend to use as
their strategy when (with ATA) they have a 512 byte write from an older
file system/setup into a 4K block. The case where errors magically 
appear

Well, you have logical and physical sector size changes.

First generation of 1K sector drives will continue to use the same 
512-byte ATA sector size you are familiar with.  A single 512-byte 
write will cause the drive to perform a read-modify-write cycle.  This 
configuration is physical 1K sector, logical 512b sector.

It would seem that most writes would avoid this - hopefully the drive 
firmware could use the write cache to coalesce contiguous IO's into 1k 
multiples when getting streams of 512 byte write requests.

A future configuration will change the logical ATA interface away from 
512-byte sectors to 1K or 4K.  Here, it is impossible to read a 
quantity smaller than 1K or 4K, whatever the sector size is.

    Jeff

I will try and see if I can get some specific information on when the 
various flavors of this are going to appear...

ric