1. Forum
  2. USENET
  3. comp.sys.mac.system

  • Disk block size

    From JF Mezei@jfmezei.spamnot@vaxination.ca to comp.sys.mac.system on Wednesday, December 16, 2020 01:55:20
    From Newsgroup: comp.sys.mac.system

    High Sierra.

    Since the Trash Cash as no internal storage, I have 4 external SATA
    drives in a SATA to Thunderbolt enclosure. ( OWC Thunder Bay 4
    (Thunderbolt 2).


    They are all 512byte block size.

    Thinking about buying new drives to start to replace existing ones.
    Some of them are available with 4k block size (4096 bytes).

    the small SSD in the Mac Pro 2013 has 4096 block size. But it si APFS
    while my spinning drives are all 512.


    -Does HFS+ support 4096 block sizes on the drive itself? (I know it uses
    this as cluster size for allocation of files, but that is different from
    disk read/write).

    -Does an enclosure which converts from Thunderbolt to SATA care about
    about whether the disk block size is 512 or 4096 or does it just take a
    SATA packet embedded in Thunderbolt packet and hand it off to the disk
    no matter what size the packet is?


    Just want a sanity check to see if this is a no brainer plug and play or whether this is something I should be concerned about.


    As a side note, Any caveats in copying a backup drive to another? I
    recall a thread here where there is some kid of disk ID info in the disk database, but unsure and since everything here degrades into mudslinging insults, it is pointless to try to find it.

    Some of the web searches just say to copy the backupdb from old to new
    drivem and then instruct Time Machine to use the backup in new drive.
    That simple? Any other steps after that to make it bootable since time
    machine backups are apparently bootable? (I realise I hacve to create
    EFI partition separately).
    --- Synchronet 3.18b-Win32 NewsLink 1.113