Windows® Internals, Sixth Edition, Part 2

Disk storage areal density has increased from 2,000 bits per square inch in 1956 to over 650 billion bits per square inch in 2011, with most of that gain coming in the last 15 years. Disk manufacturers are reaching the physical limits of current magnetic disk technology, so they are changing the format of the disks: increasing the sector size from 512 bytes to 4,096 bytes, and changing the size of the error correcting code (ECC) from 50 bytes to 100 bytes. This new disk format is known as the advanced format. The size of the advanced format sector was chosen because it matches the x86 page size and the NTFS cluster size. The advanced format provides about 10 percent greater capacity by reducing the amount of overhead per sector (everything except the data area is overhead) and through better error correcting capabilities. (A single 100-byte ECC is better than eight 50-byte ECCs). The downside to advanced format disks is potentially wasted space for small files, but as you’ll see in Chapter 12, NTFS has a mechanism for efficiently storing small files.

Advanced format disks provide an emulation mechanism (known as 512e) for legacy operating systems that understand only 512-byte sectors. With 512e, the host does not know that the disk supports 4,096-byte sectors; it continues to read and write 512-byte sectors (called logical blocks). The disk’s controller will translate a logical block number into the correct physical sector. For example, if the host issues a read request for logical block number 6, then the disk controller will read physical sector number 0 into its internal buffer and return only the 512-byte portion corresponding to logical block 6 to the host, as shown in Figure 9-1.

Figure 9-1. Advanced format sector with 512e

Writes are a little more complicated in that they require the disk’s controller to perform a read-modify-write operation, as shown in Figure 9-2.

The host writes logical block 6 to the controller.

The controller maps logical block 6 to physical sector 0 and reads the entire sector into the controller’s memory.

The controller copies logical block 6 into its position within the copy of the physical sector in the controller’s memory.

The controller writes the 4,096-byte physical sector from memory back to the disk.

Obviously, there is a performance penalty associated with using 512e, but advanced format disks will still work with legacy operating systems.

Figure 9-2. 512e read-modify-write operation

Windows supports native 4,096-byte advance format sectors, so there is no additional read-modify-write overhead. As you will see in Chapter 12, NTFS was written to support sectors of more than 512 bytes and by default issues disk I/Os using a 4,096-byte cluster. The Windows cache manager (see Chapter 11) will attempt to reduce the penalty of applications assuming 512-byte sectors; however, applications should be upgraded to query the size of a disk’s sectors (by issuing an IOCTL_STORAGE_QUERY_PROPERTY I/O request and examining the returned BytesPerPhysicalSector value) and not assume 512-byte sectors when performing sector I/O. It is very important that partitioning tools understand the size of a disk’s physical sectors and align partitions to physical sector boundaries because partitions must be an integral number of physical sectors.

Solid State Disks

Recently, the cost of manufacturing flash memory has decreased to the point where manufacturers are building storage subsystems with a disk-type interface, calling the device a solid state disk (SSD) or flash disk. As far as Windows is concerned, an SSD is a disk, but there are some important differences between a rotating disk and an SSD that Windows has to support. Before getting into the details of how Windows supports SSDs, let’s look at how an SSD is implemented.

Flash memory in some respects is very similar to a computer’s RAM (random access memory), except that flash memory does not lose its contents when the power is removed, which means that flash memory is nonvolatile. The most common types of flash memory are NOR and NAND. NOR flash memory is operationally the closest to RAM in that each byte is individually addressable, while NAND flash memory is organized into blocks, like a disk. Typically, NOR-type flash memory is used to hold the BIOS on your computer’s motherboard, and NAND-type flash memory is used in SSDs.