LBA has long since been the norm on PCs. CHS addressing may be used by some fairly ancient BIOSes for boot sector retrieval[1], but that is about it
[1] Hence why some have a limitation that the boot partition must be within the first 1024 cylinders.
You're confusing sectors with clusters. Sectors (physical minimum addressable unit of information on the disk) will remain at 512 byte, even when the OS is using 4K clusters (i.e. has a minimum allocation of
8 sectors per logical block)
LBA is just fakery as CHS was. LBA addresses do not know what the actual head, platter values are. CHS is still used to report the size BTW.
Pretty sure you are missing something else.
A logical to physical mapping in the disk hardware itself.
Whereby actual physical sectors, physical tracks, and physical platters are mapped to logical sectors and tracks.
It may APPEAR that you have 512 byte sectors on one contiguous platter with one head reading it, but chances are its nothing like that in reality. Indeed the drive may carry its own bad block/sector remapping tools, and seamlessly avoid certain physical areas without you being aware of it.
One reason why the moment you see REPORTED disk errors, the disk is probably so far gone as to need instant replacement.
If you turn on SMART reporting you do get rather more notice; you can see the 'orrors mounting up.
Yup, that's where Logical Block Addressing (LBA) comes in. It presents the drive a one great long lump of blocks, numbers sequentially, and hides the details of the disk geometry altogether.
SMART can report some classes of failure sooner if you have it turned on.
LBA is more fakery than CHS - there was at least a time that actually did reflect the real geometry of the drive (back in ST506/MFM/RLL controller days).
Yup, that is the point - its logical addressing scheme, not a physical one.
Not sure I follow?
The LBA 48 command set simply reports the max number of available logical blocks at the controller level. Win32 APIs like GetDiskFreeSpaceEx just report the size in bytes.
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