New Hard Drive '4K' standard. How will it affect Amiga?

[AndyFC]

All hard drive manufacturers are going to start shiping their hard drives with 4K sectors, and not 512b sectors.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2010/03/10/wd_targets_windows_xp_4k/

Does anyone know if Amiga OS (classic and 4.x) will be able to handle this at all, and if not natively, can the OS be patched?

[Ilwrath]

All hard drive manufacturers are going to start shiping their hard drives with 4K sectors, and not 512b sectors.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2010/03/10/wd_targets_windows_xp_4k/

Does anyone know if Amiga OS (classic and 4.x) will be able to handle this at all, and if not natively, can the OS be patched?

It looks like most of the drives will have a jumper for a 512-byte compatibility mode.  This mode may not offer the full performance benefits, but then again, the drive is so much faster than the Amiga interface, I'd be highly surprised if there would be any performance hit by enabling it.  So just put the jumper on, the drive presents its logical geometry as 512-byte, problem solved.  (Well, other than how you'd recognize 2TB of storage...)

[platon42]

It looks like most of the drives will have a jumper for a 512-byte compatibility mode.  This mode may not offer the full performance benefits, but then again, the drive is so much faster than the Amiga interface, I'd be highly surprised if there would be any performance hit by enabling it.  So just put the jumper on, the drive presents its logical geometry as 512-byte, problem solved.  (Well, other than how you'd recognize 2TB of storage...)

Yeah, I don't think that there will be a problem with larger block sizes, but 2 TB is probably a dead end for most IDE/SCSI device driver. Poseidon's massstorage.class supports even larger drives than 2 TB (in theory, I could never test it), and also supports an emulation mode to convert the 4 KB blocks back to 512 blocks if the app needs this (some filesystems do, such as FAT95).

[alexh]

I worked on the hardware for the first ever 4K drives five years ago which are just now becoming mainstream. The Amiga will never be affected because the write burst rate even with RMW is way in excess of Amiga IDE capability.

Remember that all planned current generation 4K physical drives have 512Byte logical support. (i.e. they work just like the old ones)

Drives without 512Kbyte logical emulation are at least another 5 years away.