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.

Misaligned Sector Results: I/O Performance

On this page and the next we’ll only be comparing the 750 GB sector aligned drive to a misaligned setup to look at just this difference. All other results will compare the newer, 750 GB 4 KB sector drive to the older 640 GB 512 byte drive.

As you can see, the unaligned setup results in a performance impact of up to 50%, depending on the workload. Workloads that do not involve write operations, such as the Web server test pattern, don’t show any disadvantage at all in I/O testing.

Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos