Improved storage format requires a special solution for the old system.
Today’s hard drives are divided into sectors, each of which contains 512 bytes. This has been the standard for hard drives in more than 25 years. According to BBC News , this standard because it was the size used on IBM disks.
At 25 years, the hard drive storage capacity increased from a few megabytes to several terabytes. This has led to the sector size of 512 bytes is no longer appropriate. Among the reasons for this is that parts of each sector is not available for normal data, but used to, among other things feilkorrigeringsskoder (ECC). Also, there must be a little physical stay on the hard drive between each sector, which represents quite a lot of space when the number of sectors is high.
In addition, the possibility to perform efficient error correction has been reduced by increasing storage density on hard disks.
Therefore, a total hard drive industry have agreed that the hard drives from January 2011 will make use of sectors that can accommodate 4,096 bytes (4K). This has been done through trade IDEMA . The new format is also called the Advanced Format Technology , and was already in 2009 adopted in individual hard drives.
According to BBC News, a transition to 4K sectors mean that only one eighth as much of the hard disk space will go to the error correction, despite the fact that the space made available for error correction for each sector, doubled.
For the user this should mean that hard drives can fit between 7 and 11 percent more data.
The planning of this transition has been underway since 1998, and both the operating system vendors and BIOS manufacturers have had ample time to prepare. Support for 4K sectors are now included in Windows Vista and later, Mac OS X Tiger and later, and Linux kernels released after September 2009. BIOS support began to come into place in 2006. All newer computers should have the support of the format.
But Windows XP was released long before the 4K standard was completed, and Microsoft should not have included such support in subsequent service packs.
This could have been a big problem, but hard drive manufacturers have been prescient and offers various solutions to resolve this. Typically, users of the new hard drives had to make sure the hard disk’s physical sectors are divided into logical sectors, each of 512 bytes. Then they can be read by Windows XP. This should be done either by using a jumper ( jumper ) or software that hard drive manufacturers offer.
The downside of this is primarily reduced performance. BBC News said David Burks, a product manager at Seagate , the hard drives in some cases will have to perform two steps to write data, instead of just one. This will introduce a delay of about 5 milliseconds. This will reduce the performance by up to 10 percent. Read the full story