New format of hard drive storage coming in 2011

Hard drives are about to undergo one of the biggest format shifts in 30 years.

Amateur Radio Newsline's Norm Seeley, KI7UP, has more:

By early 2011 all magnetic hard drives will use an advanced format that changes how they go about saving the data people store on them.

The move to the advanced format will make it easier for hard drive makers to produce bigger drives that use less power and are more reliable. However, it might also mean problems for Windows XP users who swap an old drive for one using the changed format.

According to Science On-Line, since the days of the original DOS operating system, the space on a hard drive has been formatted into blocks 512 bytes in size based on the floppy disks of that era. Each 512 byte sector has a marker showing where it begins and an area dedicated to storing error correction codes. In addition a tiny gap has to be left between each sector.

While 512 bytes made sense hard drives were only a few megabytes in size, its of less significance when drives can hold a terabyte or more of data. As a result, in large drives this wasted space where data cannot be stored can take up a significant proportion of the drive.

Drive makers say that moving to an advanced format of 4 kilobyte sectors means about eight times less wasted space. This will allow drives to devote twice as much space per block to error correction technology.

Norm Seeley, KI7UP
Amateur Radio Newsline

Through the International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association
all hard drive makers have committed to adopting the 4 Kilobyte advanced
format by the end of January 2011. These same manufacturers have begun an education and awareness campaign to let people know about the introduction of the news advanced format. Also, to warn about the problems it could cause for users of older operating systems such as Windows XP or ME. This is because Windows XP, ME, 2000 and the like were all released well before the new 4 kilobyte format was decided on.

Source: ARNewsline, Science OnLine