2011 will see biggest hard drive change in decades!

There hasn’t been a great deal of news about it so far but soon our hard drives will never be the same again.

At the moment, our hard disc drives are formatted into 512 byte size blocks and have been that way for years but as from the first quarter of next year hard drive suppliers will start shipping hard drives with 4 K disc sizes.

All hard drive suppliers have agreed to adopt the 4 K size by the end of January next year through the International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association (IDEMA).

IDEMA has set up BigSector dot org which is a “consortium of leading storage industry software and hardware companies formed to provide the industry with guidance and support for implementing larger physical sector sizes” says the site.

“Disk drives with larger physical sectors allow enhanced data protection and correction algorithms, which provide increased data reliability.

“Larger physical sectors also enable greater format efficiencies, thereby freeing up space for additional user data. These improvements will result in better user experiences” BigSector explains.

Basically the larger size means we will be able to have bigger hard drives that are more secure, more efficient and more reliable.

Although 512 bytes has been perfectly ok up till now, this size is no longer appropriate when hard drives can hold so much more data than they could before.

“The technology has changed but that fundamental building block of formatting has not” said David Burks, a product marketing manager for storage firm Seagate reported the BBC.

Ok so the larger size sounds great and yes there will be a few teething problems, there always are with new technology. However, one in particular is how the larger hard drive sizes might affect Windows XP users.

Windows XP was released before it was decided to up the block size of hard drives to 4 K so technically isn’t “4 K aware” whereas Windows Vista, Windows 7, X Tiger, Snow Leopard and the Linux kernel released after September 2009 are all 4 K compliant according to the BBC report.

“All other things being equal you will have a noticeable hard drive reduction in performance” said Mr Burks who reckoned it could slow it down by as much as 10 percent.

Those who are building their own computers or swapping a hard drive for one with the new format are apparently the users who are most likely to experience problems.