What's New in Disk Management?

The following disk management features are new in this Oracle Solaris release:

• Advanced Format Disk Support

Advanced Format Disk Support

Previous Oracle Solaris releases support disks with a physical block size and a logical block size of 512 bytes. This is the traditional disk block size that is an industry standard.

Currently, disk manufacturers are providing larger capacity disks, also known as advanced format (AF) disks, which is a general term that describes a hard disk drive that exceeds a 512-byte block size.

AF disks are generally in the 4-KB block size range, but vary as follows:

• 4-KB native disk (4kn) – Has a physical and logical block size of 4 KB

• 512-byte emulation (512e) – Has a physical block size of 4 KB but reports a logical block size of 512 bytes

For comparison purposes, Oracle Solaris introduces the 512-byte native (512n) disk term, which is a traditional disk with 512-byte block size.

Oracle Solaris 10 1/13 supports advanced format disks, in additional to traditional 512n disks, in the following ways:

• Non-root UFS or ZFS file systems are supported on 4kn and 512e disks

• SPARC: You can boot and install a UFS or ZFS root file system on 512e disk.

• x 86: You can boot and install a UFS root file system on a 512e disk.

Before purchasing advanced format drives, confirm with your device manufacturer that their 512e devices have a power-safe feature to prevent data loss after a power failure when data is still in transit.