n00b Q - sector size or some such - please help

[Chris Beard]

Hi all,

I read something somewhere about the fundimental physical thingies in hard drives getting bigger for large platter sizes. There was something about the offset for windows xp being wrong and it completely screwing performance. Unfortunatly I can't remember what it was called to search for it now I want a new HDD.

Abuse me all you want - as long as you tell me what I'm babbling about at the same time please?

Thanks,
Chris.

 

[rpstewart]

You're talking about the move from 512 byte to 4Kb physical sectors - the current WD Green models (EARS coded ones) are the first ones to do this. The problem with XP is it tends to start partitions at an offset which leads to the partition straddling sector boundaries.

There's a good description here.

 

[Chris Beard]

Thank you!

 

[BIGBC]

There's a good description here.

Interesting read, cheers for that