Analysis: The Impact Of Shifting From 512 Byte To 4 KB Sectors

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Slowly but surely, hard drives with 4 KB sectors are replacing the "legacy" 512 byte sector size. By January 2011, all drive vendors will have made this transition. Buyers of new PCs are safe, but there are still a few performance pitfalls to note.

Benchmark Results: Access Time And I/O Performance

The following pages show the test results for the two different drives and the 750 GB MK7559GSXP running under Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 with aligned sectors, or in other words, an ideal environment.

Overall, access time and I/O performance does not differ much. The results show that there isn’t a disadvantage for the newer 750 GB, 4 KB sector size hard drive.

Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos