Transformation to Hard drives
The year is 2010, its time some thing undergo changes. Technology has never been at ease, it changes everyday, something new turns up and outdates other. Now The Hard drives as we know them , are about to undergo a major format shift, this format shift will be the biggest in the last 30 years. It is being said that by early 2011 all harddrives will change how we the users store our data on them. The HDD’s will use advanced format to achieve this. This enhancement will help store more data, more effeciently & while conserving power usage. But the problem arises when we think that right now many users are still on Windows XP, who dont plan to migrate soon to Windows 7.
“The technology has changed but that fundamental building block of formatting has not,” said David Burks, a product marketing manager for storage firm Seagate.
By change in technology, it means that there were times when the hard drives were just few megabytes in size, and formatting them with a 512byte block partition made a whole lot sense, but what now ? when people are using 1TB ( 1024 GB) as a standard Drisk for their computing needs. This fine resolution on hard drives is causing a problem,manager said, because of the wasted space associated with each tiny block.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. In large drives this wasted space where data cannot be stored can take up a significant proportion of the drive.
Moving to an advanced format of 4K sectors means about eight times less wasted space but will allow drives to devote twice as much space per block to error correction.
“You can get yourself into a corner where you cannot squeeze much more onto the disk,” said Steve Perkins, a technical consultant for Western Digital.
This shift also allows manufacturers to make more efficient use of the real estate on a hard drive.
“We can put more data on the disk,” he said. “It’s about 7-11% more efficient as a format.”
Source | BBC
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