In the world of storage technologies evolve slowly. Whether the physical level (the principle of hard drives for several decades) or logic level. But the "basics" of hard drives, the sector of 512 bytes, and should soon change with a move to 4 KB for the next version of 2TB hard drives from Western Digital, according to rumor.

More capacity

Specifically, a disk drive is physically organized with 512 byte sectors, each with a header from a few bytes (for synchronization) and a zone containing data (ECC for error correction). First gain passage to 4 kb, we go from eight to a zone header. Moreover, the gain on the error correction will improve it: overall, correct to 4 kb requires only a few bytes more than correct to 512 bytes, which can increase efficiency while earning space (up from eight areas to one, yet). In practice, formatting a hard disk with 4KB sectors expected to earn between 7 and 11% of usable capacity at the same density.

More speed, but problems

More interesting, the whole should be a little faster: the current computer technology tends to work with larger files than what was there 20 or 30 years. Overall, a hard disk could then read (and hide) 4 kb in one go instead of working with "only" 512 bytes, which is expected to gain a little speed in some cases. Obviously, there will be some early issues: operating systems are not designed for this type of hard drive and Western Digital will integrate management therefore "invisible" to the new: the hard disk controller working in industry 512 bytes with the operating system and then he showed the necessary conversion to 4 kb. Moreover, a problem (already present on the SSD) is available on some (old) OS: alignment scores. Typically, there is an alignment with the physical sectors for optimal performance and legacy systems do not. Windows Vista or 7 do not cause problems on this point, but Windows XP (and earlier systems) require specific formatting tool.

In practice, 4KB sectors should be democratized in the year 2010 (even if only to gain in capacity) but manufacturers should definitely use this type of physical format in 2011 or 2012, when OS will be able to work directly in sector 4 kb.