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Hard Disc Drives to Undergo Advanced Format Change

hard drive formatsHard drives are about to undergo a change from the present format to an advanced format early next year. All hard drive manufacturers have agreed to adopt the new format by the end of January 2011 through the International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association (IDEMA). The new changes will make it easier for hard discs to save data thus resulting in better use of power and reliability. Presently, hard drives are formatted into standard blocks of 512 bytes while advances in technology has seen the production of drives that can hold up to one terabyte of data hence resulting in a lot of spaces being wasted per block.

The new format will see a move to an advanced format of 4K sectors thus resulting in better performance, efficiency and error handling. Unfortunately, older versions of many operating systems were not configured to handle 4K hard disc formats therefore computer users who swap an old drive for the 4K ones will be potentially faced with compatibility problems. However, computer users with operating systems that were released after September 2009 such as Windows 7, Vista, OS X Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard and Linux Kernel, will not be affected as these systems are already 4K aware. Hopefully, more can be done to make older operating systems more compatible with the advanced hard drive before sale begins.

Talking Point

Are you aware of the imminent hard disc format change? Can more be done to make people more aware of the situation?

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12 Comments

12 Comments

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  4. Austin

    June 13, 2010 at 9:53 pm

    Still playing catchup with SSD’s, huh? Well, I don’t think standard hard drives are going to die any time soon. It’s good they’re making things more efficient.

  5. External hard drive

    July 23, 2010 at 2:00 am

    Biggest headache for hard drive retailers in the world… here comes the fun days

  6. Marques Shane

    December 12, 2010 at 2:12 am

    Looks like everybody having XP will have to move to Windows 7 soon. Those who avoided buying Vista also will be forced to upgrade.

  7. Maureen

    March 17, 2011 at 7:56 am

    No I was not aware of it but thanks for keeping me informed 🙂

  8. Carla

    March 24, 2011 at 1:11 pm

    I see they are even gonna release a 4 tb soon how exiting

  9. Mark

    April 25, 2011 at 11:17 am

    I have experienced this with 3 pc’s I have at home, I tried upgrading their RAM’s and Hard disks but as I went on to the project, because I have always used Windows XP and thought this OS absorbs less viruses than of what we have now… The swap was unsuccessful I had the shop replace the hard disks to lower cApacity.

  10. May

    May 20, 2011 at 7:46 pm

    I agree with Marques Shane’s comment. I guess it just means it’s time to upgrade now. It seems Windows Vista has always been better.

  11. Marc Rasmussen

    August 9, 2011 at 1:08 pm

    I don’t think this news has been widely spread out. I cannot say that I’m super up to date when it comes to changes in technology. But no, I haven’t heard about this one.

  12. faye

    April 24, 2013 at 1:34 pm

    I agree with Marques Shane’s comment.

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