4k Sectors don't seem to promise huge advantage.
 

Is there something I'm missing here, going from 512 to 4k I would have thought would be a major improvement, but 12% speed was mentioned. Capacity I'm not clear about, but the waste saving seemingly will be partly negated by better error correction.

not quite
 

it means swap page sizes on modern pcs (W7) can be increased, improving speed. The current bottleneck is this, not cpu with the advent of quad core etc. Speed becomes disc & data transfer bound rather than cpu bound at the mo, means we will be able to do more faster when it is somewhat relieved byt this change. Happened on mainframes years ago, so just following in their footsteps. NB this pc has more proceesing power than the first mainframe I worked on ;)

You have to be really really desperate to do any swapping. Personally I'd rather spend the money on more RAM than on fancy disks, for a speed improvement of a couple of orders of magnitude.
I rather expect that my phone has more processing power than the first mainframe I worked on. (My watch probably hasn't.)

LR. Sorry,confused.

512 bytes is the NTFS sector size. 4Kbs is the standard cluster size. Have you changed the cluster size via disk manager?

For general purpose use, 4K is optimal. You only really see definite performance improvements above this is you do a lot of large file handling.

Yes, the larger the cluster, the more "slack" you have on your disk as every file is padded out to a full cluster size multiple but I don't see the link with error correction?

Simonta,

We're talking here about the transition from a default sector size of 512 bytes to 4KB - see here:

AnandTech: Western Digital?s Advanced Format: The 4K Sector Transition Begins

SD

I'm actually surprised that you see any performance improvement: I believe the current 4k sector drives actually lie and claim to be 512-byte sector drives, so I'd expect performance to be worse if you aren't writing big files (writing 512 bytes means the disk has to read 4k then update those 512 bytes and then write 4k back to the disk).

I'm not entirely sure of the mechanism myself, but apparently 4k sectors can provide better error correction with less overhead, so you can fit more useful data on the disk in space that would previously have been used for error correction bits.

When I was doing quality control on the IBM keyboard line it was the Sysem 360 with ferrite doughnut RAM and I wouldn't doubt that your watch has - even if it's clockwork :}

370/165 - think that just beats my watch!

GTW
 

not that I need the home processing power to play games & surf, it's just the anti stuff scans take less than a handfull of minutes rather than hours ;)