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

I have a 1TB drive and I formatted it so the sectors are 64KB. Terrible for an OS as it has a ton of small files, but for media storage its great.

 

No, the physical sector sizes are always 512Byte, but the virtual ones are 64KB. The drive does the calculation of virtual to physical data when it deals with OS requests. It's the same if NTFS is 4KB and the drive is 512Byte, like it has been for years. Technically 4KB drive and 4KB disk = performance advantage due to less calculation time.

 

Using GPT (Vista, Windows 7) you can create partitions bigger than 2TB but on Vista you can't boot from GPT. Not sure if this is fixed on Windows 7 or not.

 

Actually GPT has been supported in Vista since SP1, but since motherboards still use the ancient BIOS technology you can't boot from pure GPT drives anyways. You can however use GPT with a MBR sector just for the booting. There are articles about this on the internet.

This is again up to the firmware. BIOS vs UEFI. When will they upgrade to UEFI? Wasn't MSI all up to that a while back? then they went silent about it.

 

you mean a 2tb disc will be closer to actually being 2tb, since the marketing label versus actualy bytes is different number system. So it would be closer to the marketing label which will be nice. Be interesting to see the benches on these.

 

Not a spelling nazi though I take it...

 

Kelsey Grammer is a nazi?

 

Hmm, I don't know how they will market drives using 4k format. The usual beef with marketed drive sizes is that 1TiB (2^40 bytes) is not the same as 1TB (10^12 bytes). The former is 1,099,511,627,776, the latter 1,000,000,000,000. HDD manufacturers typically describe an HDD as a 1TB drive if it has 10^12 raw (unformatted) storage bytes. This is in fact approx 0.91 TiB, so you're "losing" 9% drive space to the marketing blurb. That's before formatting eats another chunk of space in format overheads, reducing your actual usable space a bit further.

Now, HDD platters are the sizes they are so that drive manufacturers can hit specific marketing targets - a drive with 3 x 333GB platters allows them to describe a drive as 1TB, which is much nicer sounding than 960GB using 3 x 320GB platters or 1.05TB using 3 x 350GB platters. With 4k formatting, the *same* physical platter provides more data storage because the drive's internal overheads for sector lead-in and ECC are reduced. The space efficiency is derived at controller level, and a platter that would give 333GB in a 512 byte sector drive might provide (say) 400GB in a 4k sector drive. However, at least in the short term, there's no way the manufacturers are going to re-tool to adjust to the requisite platters for nice round number drive sizes using 4k format. This means they'll be churning out 3 x (say) 400GB drives. Whether this will be marketed as 1TB (with couple of hundred extra GBs as a bonus) or a 1.2TB drive remains to be seen, but I expect the latter. So for a couple of generations we might get 1.2TB, 1.8TB and 2.4TB 4k sector drives where previously there were 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB 512 byte sector drives, but after that I expect they'll have readjusted for new platter sizes and we'll be back to nice round numbers for the 3TB, 4TB and 5TB drives we can look forward to.

As ever, apologies for the rambling nature of this post...

 

You can rest assured that any increase in space due to the new 4K format will not be seen by the user. Either they'll make smaller platters or the extra storage space will be set aside for defect management.

 

The problem here is the incorrect use of words.

512 bytes is the physical disk sector size.
64KB is the CLUSTER size of the filesystem.

Clusters are blocks of sectors used to store files or file fragments.

 

^True.. tho I gotta say I have never had problems regarding bad sectors :\ or any hard drive issue at all.

 

Lucky, lucky person!

Tbh, if you get bad sectors the whole drive is going to have an RMA eventually tbh.

 

true, either way this will be great, cant wait to see how it all plays out.

 

very interesting article this one, might have to wait and see what the performance is on these new drives before seeing about buying one!

 

does any one know if a simple fix to install xp on one of these drives would be to use a newer linux live cd to pre partition the hard drive before installing windows

 

Just bringing this one up again... as I am in the market for a new drive.
Has Samsung said they are going to be doing this?
Or are they already and not told anyone?
-J