Hard drive manufacturers are set to improve the speed, capacity, and power consumption of their drives by 2011. While this technology will benefit users of Windows 7 and other modern operating systems, Windows XP users may actually be facing a performance hit by using the new drives.
This technology improvement, called Advanced Format Architecture (at least by Western Digital), is mandated by an agreement of the International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association, which says that by 2011 all hard drive makers must sell drives using 4 kilobyte sectors instead of 512 byte sectors, the current default.
Let’s break that overly technical explanation into something simpler: Most hard drives on the market now, from the lowly 80GB drives to the hulking 2 TB monsters, store their data in small blocks called sectors. Those sectors can store 512 bytes of data, but each sector also has a small gap between it – the space in each gap is used to correct errors and to store additional information that the drive needs to function properly.
Basically, the 4 kilobyte sector would require fewer gaps, total, across an entire hard drive, thus saving space on a hard drive platter and increasing the drive’s overall efficiency. The technology is best demonstrated by the image below:
Courtesy HotHardware.com
The extra space can be used to give the user more storage, or to allow the manufacturer to provide the same amount of storage on a smaller hard drive platter.
Most current operating systems, including Mac OS X versions 10.4 and above, most Linux distributions, Windows Vista and Windows 7, can take advantage of the benefits of the new technology, but the aging Windows XP will actually see visible slowdown in many cases.
This is due to an emulation technique used by the new drives that allows legacy operating systems, such as Windows XP, to treat them like older 512 byte sector drives. The performance hit is expected to be about ten percent.
One reason why some users cling to Windows XP is because of its speed, but along with reports that multi-core and hyperthreaded processors offer better performance in Windows 7, this new hard drive format serves as another bullet point in the list of reasons to abandon the aging operating system.
The upside is that by 2011, Windows XP should be on its way out, and many of its remaining users will be running it on older computers instead of brand-new machines using the new hard drive technology. It’s possible that, despite the potential for lesser performance, many casual computer users won’t even notice the change.
Sources: HotHardware, DailyTech
Can the next generation of hard drives can be actually be smaller and non-heavy then the current hard drives? The current hard drives are kind of heavy. Smaller hard drives but with better performance and more storage. Currently, the solid-state-drive can’t replace the next generation hard drives because it’s expensive and other factors.
I think it is possible that the hard drives will evolve into smaller, larger storage and more advance in the future. Just see how technology works nowadays.
We don’t need SMALLER HDD’s.We need fast drives, such as SSD’s and hybrids.I don’t believe consumers actually care how “OH NO ITS LARGE AND HEAVY” it is, if it’s quality and built for desktops, along with good speed.What we really need s 5 1/2 inch SSD drives, cheaper, better for consumers, and get rid of this ridiculous “make everything smaller” idea.I have never been happy with a smaller computer. They always seem to be the ones that break… and due to size, reparations may be impossible on some components, or at least a pain to remove and replace.In the future, 3D is going to require a darned lot of power, including HDD speed and capacity. We simply should not do this with a smaller mentality, or else it will be expensive as heck, when all we need is speed and capacity. Hybrid HDD/SSD is great for that.
A larger, 5 1/2 inch SSD or SSD/HDD hybrid is going to be cheaper, and whether you realize it or not, RAM basically is a hybrid. RAM has a cache, and the reason DDR3 is faster than DDR2, is cache size.
HDD’s have been the slowest piece of equipment in a computer for a long time. It’s time for advancement, not cookie-cutter “make it small” mentality imo.
As I said, smaller is for laptops, netbooks, and other near irreparable stuff. Please don’t suggest small and light desktops, or they will. And that’s just scary. Then you could bet your going to have a massive repair bill on the small computer components, and you might as well buy a new computer.
Great Post.
Smaller is only good for laptops. In a blade server environment smaller HD’s might make sense in the future. But let’s work on speed, capacity and reliability.
Your 5 1/2 ” idea is a really good one, whether it’s a SSD or a SSD/HDD hybrid.
Want to get a 3TB HD for my next HD. Was looking at the WD 3.0TB hard drive and saw the new Advanced Format Architecture being talked about in the comments on Newegg. Glad I read that on there, it looks like I will have to go from WinXP to Win7 on my 2 year old Intel Quad core. This will make me make the switch for sure.