Knowledge Base

BSPs and drivers

Community resources

Product documentation

Questions?

Advanced Format (>512 Byte sector) hard disk in QNX Neutrino

________________________________________________________________________

Applicable Environment

________________________________________________________________________

Topic: Advanced Format (>512 Byte sector) hard disk in QNX Neutrino
SDP: 6.5.0
Target: Any supported target

________________________________________________________________________

Recommendation

________________________________________________________________________

Hard disks are moving from the traditional 512 byte sector to larger sizes, e.g. 4 KB. More can be read about this on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format

The firmware on these disks automatically converts accesses to 512 byte sectors internally to 4 KB to allow OS's, including QNX, to function unchanged. QNX has done some testing of AF drives and found them to work well. Drives with 512 byte sectors that are greater than 2 TB are not working well in QNX 6.5.0 and earlier, so you should avoid those.

For optimal performance with AF disks, you will need to partition the disk such that partitions begin on 4 K boundaries. This will likely happen naturally for the 1st partition, but any additional partitions that you may want will require the 1st to be a multiple of 4 KB. All of the normal QNX tools should work fine.

________________________________________________________________________

NOTE: This entry has been validated against the SDP version listed above. Use caution when considering this advice for any other SDP version. For supported releases, please reach out to QNX Technical Support if you have any questions/concerns.

________________________________________________________________________

Related Attachments

None Found

Please contact us with your questions or concerns.