Hard disks con settori da 4096 bytes

clipped from linux.slashdot.org linux Glyn Moody writes "Today is the birthday of Linus. Just under 19 years ago, on the first day the shops in Helsinki were open after the holidays, Linus rushed out and spent all his Christmas and birthday money on his first PC: a DX33 80386, with 4 Megs of RAM, no co-processor, and a 40 Megabyte hard disc. Today, the kernel he wrote on that system powers 90% of the fastest supercomputers, and is starting to find its way into more and more smartphones — not to mention everything in between. What would the world look like had he spent his money on something else?" slashdot linux linus smartphones supercomputers freebsd story * clipped from hardware.slashdot.org "As previously discussed on Slashdot, according to AnandTech and The Tech Report, hard disk drive manufacturers are now ready to bump the size of the disk sector from 512 to 4096 bytes, in order to minimize storage lost to ECC and sync. This may not be a smooth transition, because some OSes do not align partitions on 4K boundaries."

19 anni fa: data storica in cui Linus Torvalds comprava un 386/33 (dopo un Sinclair QL) su cui smanettare creando un nuovo sistema operativo. Poco tempo dopo comprai la mia colossale 386/40 (in realtà una 386/33 overclockata a 40), stessa configurazione, poi espansa a 8Mb RAM (che attualmente detengo ancora, funzionante!)

La seconda notizia c'entra, c'entra eccome: i settori da 4096 bytes sono esattamente la "pagesize" default del memory management del kernel Linux. Potevano scegliere 2k o 8k (nota bene: sui floppy disk da 5.25" erano possibili settori da 128 bytes fino a 2kb!!), invece hanno scelto 4k.