News All new hard drives will be "4k advanced format"

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2010/02/02/all-new-hard-drives-will-be-4k-advanced-for/1

Western Digital were the first to introduce the new, larger sector, however Seagate tell us it will be uniform across the industry

 

I wonder if it'll affect speed or capacity?

 

A step in the right direction it seems... I'm with kenco: will speed or capacity be affected?

 

First time I've even heard about this! Very rare I let something like this slip...

 

what is 4k over 2TB drives these days. Its like one human hair on a basketball court!

 

I read this article, looked at the WD 1TB drive i just purchased and it turns out its one of these new fangled advanced format drives. Will i see any noticeable difference?

 

I think you've misunderstood. 4k is the new sector size. Instead of having a sector lead-in and a 40 or 80 byte error correction block every 512 bytes, you have a larger data block with a lead-in and a 100 byte error correction block only every 4096 bytes, significantly reducing overhead. Usable disk space (i.e. the space used for data after deducting overheads for sector lead-in and ECC) increases from approximately 87% (81% with 80 byte ECC) to 96%. How this translates - for a given size of platter, you get up to 20% capacity gain. Your 2TB disk becomes 2.4TB. That surely is worth caring about!

See the piece at AnandTech for the techie detail - http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3691&cp=4

 

@kenco... maybe you missed that little paragraph in the article

Yes it affects speed.. in a good way. With bigger sectors means that for the same file or data you need to write less sectors while space will be used more efficiently (less sectors = less fragmented data).

 

I think you misunderstood the article, for the example you say it wouldbe 2 TB divided into sectors of 4 Kb, where the data will be stored.

 

Im confused, your article starts "Starting in Q1 this year, all new hard drive models will contain the "big sector", yet the segate PR quote states "beginning January 1, 2011 all new product releases with SATA interfaces will support Advanced Formatted media"

So which is it? 2010? or 2011? or is the segate PR quote refering to something else?

 

But I'm a grammer nazi and there's a grammatical error in the sentence quoted, so unfortunately I didn't understand it

That's my excuse and I'mma stick to it.

 

Will we get bigger than 2TB drives ?
With MBR limited to 2TB I was wondering what was going to happen on that front.....

 

define "older" OS's - we talking pre-NT?

 

It means XP. The drive i have has special instructions for making it work in XP, all newer OS is will just work.

 

Uhh, no. Your 2Tb disk will NOT become a 2.4Tb disk. Rather, if you have a 2Tb disk (let's forget for a second that manufacturers talk about disk space in power of 10, while the actual space is in powers of 2, which means an advertised 2Tb will show up in your OS as 1.86Tb), with the old format you'd be able to use only 2*0.87 = 1.75Tb due to cluster overhead. The new format lets you utilize 2*0.96 = 1.92Tb.
No way to make that hard drive you bought have more sectors.

 

Thanks to your explanation I understood the matter a bit better. It seems advantageous, why not?! btw, how much a new hard drive with that EARS thingy?

 

About £10-15 more, but that's also because the Green drives also have a cache upgrade from 32-64MB too.

I'll let you know the performance difference in a few weeks - we've got a 1TB drive from WD on the way to compare it to the older EADS 1TB.

 

Doesn't NTFS default to an allocation unit size of 4KB since at least Windows 2000?

 

Oh wow, my new WD Green has it too. They've kept pretty quiet about this haven't they? You'd expect a bit of fanfare and *NEW FEATURE* hype

 

The downside to this is that when you get bad sectors, the damage could be worse...