1 Topic by bakegoodz

  • bakegoodz
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Topic: 4k sectors drives

WD news Green drives models ending in EARS use 4k byte sectors in stead of the very old standard of 512b sectors. The whole drive industry is going to this in the next year or so. After some research, I found that the Linux kernel and most updated Linux partition utilities has support for 4k sector drives. XP doesn't have support, thought drives have backwards compatibility though with some performance issues, unless a sector alignment utility is used. I am still uncertain if the backwards compatibility will allow a drive partitioned with XP setup tool to boot up without a tool or hacking etc. I could see how this be an issue because classic PC boot sector is the first sector which is assumed to be 512 bytes. Anybody understand this better than me? Will Gparted setup a NTFS partition and FS correctly with a 4k sector drive?

2 Reply by gedakc

  • gedakc
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Re: 4k sectors drives

GParted does not yet support drives with sector sizes other than 512 bytes.
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Much work has been done by the parted team on the underlying library to support > 512 byte sectors in the parted-2.x releases.

More work is required in GParted before GParted can take advantage of this new feature in the parted-2.x releases.

3 Reply by gedakc

  • gedakc
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Re: 4k sectors drives

GParted versions 0.6.0 and higher now support sector sizes greater than 512 bytes.