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First compelling reason to switch to Windows 7

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f0dder:
Now there might be advantages to having a better interface or improving the software to be able to deal with larger sector sizes, but I don't think that how much space is taken up by ECC and sector identification are part of them.-mwb1100 (March 14, 2010, 09:38 PM)
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Cramming more data on a platter = good. Might possibly result in better speeds sometime as well, less synchronization overhead?

mwb1100:
Now there might be advantages to having a better interface or improving the software to be able to deal with larger sector sizes, but I don't think that how much space is taken up by ECC and sector identification are part of them.-mwb1100 (March 14, 2010, 09:38 PM)
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Cramming more data on a platter = good. Might possibly result in better speeds sometime as well, less synchronization overhead?
-f0dder (March 15, 2010, 03:07 AM)
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My point was that going to a larger sector size layout on the physical platter gets you that stuff but doesn't need to change the interface that the OS sees - the HDD firmware would take care of the translation of 512-byte sector request to however things we physically laid out on the platters (and I assumed that this was already happening for a long time).

Of course there might be other benefits to increasing the sector size at the OS interface level - such as needing fewer requests to be made or increasing largest partition size without significantly changing the layout of a partition table.  But cramming more data and/or decreasing the time to find a sector probably aren't a major benefits, since I don't think the sector size at the OS interface is really dictating what's happening on the platters .

IainB:
This discussion is beginning to remind me of the discussions around the pros and cons of the 8250/16450 UARTs (Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter) which were being developed in the '80s for analogue modems. A key constraint there seemed to be the buffer throughput speeds of modems using single, and, later, double-buffering technology.

f0dder:
My point was that going to a larger sector size layout on the physical platter gets you that stuff but doesn't need to change the interface that the OS sees - the HDD firmware would take care of the translation of 512-byte sector request to however things we physically laid out on the platters (and I assumed that this was already happening for a long time).-mwb1100 (March 15, 2010, 02:18 PM)
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It's the way WD is handling things with the just-introduced 4096-bytes-per-sector drive. And it's not a smart solution, imho, because of the performance problems with unaligned writes. Really, there's enough old harddrives around that legacy systems can use, 4k-sector drives should have just been introduced without legacy support.

J-Mac:
IainB: hold back your conspiracy theory horses, there!

There's pretty sound technical reasons for going to 4096-byte sectors, but that's covered elsewhere. Western-Digital has actually gone to lengths to make legacy OSes support these drives at all - exposing 512-byte sectors and doing internal handling (which is a fault imho, they should've exposed 4k sectors and dropped legacy support), and even adding a "offset-by-1" jumper so people who can't figure out how to manually create partitions (which solves the performance problem 100%) don't get the performance problems.

As for the 4GB limit in 32bit XP, keep in mind that 4GB is the logical memory limit for a 32bit OS. Yes, since the PPro we've been able to address more than 4GB in 32bit mode, but it's done through "memory windows" - which is mostly useful for running a crapload of apps at once, or pretty specialized big applications. Basically server stuff... so while the limit might suck, it's fair enough they don't want a client OS potentially eating server OS marketshare.

What really sucks about the 4GB limit is that it's on physical memory addresses rather than "available memory", which has given all those "I have 4GB but can only use 3.25GB" problems... and that's something you can thank fscktarded 3rd-party driver developers for. XP RTM supported 4GB-total, but because of people thinking "oh, we're on 32bit, we only have to handle PHYSICALADDRESS.LOWPART", users experienced BSODs. And following tradition, Microsoft bent over for sucky 3rd-party developers instead of saying "go fix your crap if you want it to run on Windows".
-f0dder (March 13, 2010, 10:23 AM)
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@f0dder: I installed Windows 7 32-bit and thought that my 4 GB of RAM would finally be recognized, or at least more of it would be than was on XP Pro. Nay - Win7 shows the same lousy 2.75 GB RAM available also. (See attached image)

[attachthumb=#1][/attachthumb]

I have read about my Nvidia graphics card, though having a 512 MB memory cache of its own, reserves some of my 4 GB but still I though it was less than the 1.25 GB that is not available to me. Can you - or anyone here - explain to me how and why only 2.75 GB of my 4 GB of RAM is available? Not in baby talk but at least in something that might be comprehended by a non-coder?

Thanks!

Jim

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