![]() Western Digital has tested both of these operating systems, and officially classifies them as not-affected. Notably, Linux and Mac OS X are not affected by this issue. As such, Win 6.x is also affected by alignment issues when imaging software is used, as some (and perhaps all?) imaging products currently available will write misaligned partitions and/or clusters. Otherwise such imaging software may inadvertently create misaligned partitions too. Along with the need for 4K-aware operating systems, drive imaging software needs to be 4K-aware. In essence, the issue is that Win 5.x will always create a misaligned first partition and will have poor default performance as a result.Īlthough Win 5.x is the primary victim here, other versions of Windows can also be affected in edge cases. Win 5.xx in particular has a nasty habit of starting the first partition at LBA 63, which is 1 512B sector misaligned from a 4K sector boundary. Even though all operating systems will be seeing 512B sectors through the use of emulation technology on the drive controller, out of Windows only Win 6.x (Vista, 2008, Win7) and later have been programmed to take in to account the alignment issues we mentioned earlier. ![]() As a result the 5.x versions of Windows (2K, XP, 2K3, WHS) have no concept of 4KB sectors. The big problem is that while the first work on 4KB sectors started in 1998, it wasn’t until after the launch of Windows XP that the matter came to a head. Now that we’ve dealt with what 4K sectors are, why Western Digital and other drive manufacturers are switching to them, and what the potential pitfalls of 512B emulation are, we can look at the specific cases where there are potential problems.
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