If you’ve been following tech trends lately then perhaps you’ve heard about the new 4K sector hard drives.  Many newer hard drives will have a sector size of 4096 bytes whereas all previous hard drives used 512 bytes.  This change is being made for several reasons; it will allow hard drives to store more data, and it will also allow the overall size of the hard drive to increase.  But how, if at all, will this change affect the decommissioning feature of WinINSTALL?  Before I can answer that, I want to go into more details about this change.

We recently ordered some of these 4K sector hard drives to be able to test WinINSTALL decommissioning.  But while testing it the hard drives were reporting their sector size as 512 bytes.  At first I thought something was wrong, but as I researched it more I found the problem.  Internally the drive uses a 4K sector, but externally it reports the sector size as 512 bytes.  The drive automatically groups 8 sectors together to form a single 4K chunk of data which is stored in the single sector.  This is called 512 byte emulation or “512e.”  The hard drives do this because, quite frankly, the industry is not ready for the change.  For over 30 years every hard drive has used 512 byte sector sizes.  It is ubiquitous.  Everything from computers to cameras, video game consoles to DVRs rely on 512 byte sectors.  Until the hardware is updated to 4K sector sizes hard drives will need to continue to emulate 512 byte sector sizes.

As far as I can tell, all 4K sector drives at this point are “512e” drives.  At some point in the future what is already being called “native 4K” drives will appear.

So how does WinINSTALL decommissioning work on these types of drives?  All versions of WinINSTALL will work on 512 and 512e hard drives.  And starting in upcoming release of WinINSTALL 10.10.0020 (10.1 hotfix 2) it will work on native 4K hard drives.  So by the time native 4K drives arrive WinINSTALL will already work.