HDD revolution

KovacsC · **Posted:** Wed Mar 10, 2010 6:52

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8557144.stm

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

By early 2011 all 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 mean problems for Windows XP users who swap an old drive for one using the changed format.

DavPaz · **Joined:** 27th Jun, 2008 **Posts:** 38709

If you format a large disk in XP (SP3 at least) it defaults to 4k clusters anyway. Who here is still running a HDD of less than say... 10gig?

pupil · **Posted:** Wed Mar 10, 2010 10:29

WTF?! This is why it's best not to get "tech" news form the BBC. Using 4k clusters is news about 8 years ago!?!

metalangel · **Posted:** Wed Mar 10, 2010 10:32

Ah, but XP doesn't like them, whereas other OSeseses do.

kalmar · **Posted:** Wed Mar 10, 2010 10:34

What's that? Microsoft have saved the future, again! Thanks for letting me know, BBC!

itsallwater · **Posted:** Wed Mar 10, 2010 11:16

It is a strange article. Starts off saying everyone running XP will not be able to use new hard disks then continues to say what ever happens they'll emulate the old system anyway but it might be a bit slower... Also if your upgrading a 10 year old PC I'm pretty sure the hard disk would be 10% faster anyway thus negating any possible downside.

Essentially a non-news story. Everything's changing but you will not notice.

Doctor Glyndwr · **Joined:** 30th Mar, 2008 **Posts:** 32624

1) this is quite new
2) the performance penalty is quite serious
3) that's a terrible BBC article

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl ... 14/1541244

Quote:

"We've seen a few stories recently about the new Western Digital Green drives. According to WD, their new 4096-byte sector drives are problematic for Windows XP users but not Linux or most other OSes. Linux users should not be complacent about this, because not all the Linux tools like fdisk have caught up. The result is a reduction in write throughput by a factor of 3.3 across the board (a 230% overhead) when 4096-byte clusters are misaligned to 4096-byte physical sectors by one or more 512-byte logical sectors. The author does some benchmarks to demonstrate this. Also, from the comments on the article, it appears that even parted is not ready, since by default it aligns to 'cylinder' boundaries, which are not physical cylinder boundaries and are multiples of 63."

kalmar · **Posted:** Wed Mar 10, 2010 11:44

Hmm, I have one of those drives, can't see what it thinks its sector size is though.

KovacsC · **Posted:** Wed Mar 10, 2010 12:02

I was bored about 5am this morning so went on the BBC website.. sorry won't post from there again

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HDD revolution
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HDD revolution
Death to XP