Western Digital has launched the first hard drive formatting taking a novel called AFT. The Advanced Technology Format allows hard drives that use it to offer a higher capacity to perform better and be more reliable. This is mainly to increase the minimum size of a sector of 512 bytes to 4 kilobytes. The block error correction is expanded, allowing it to be 50% more efficient than before, while disk space is freed, allowing the ability to make a leap of 7 to 11%. The performance gains are not quantified at this time.

SSDs and RAID configurations in use already in 4 KB blocks minimum. With the arrival of the AFT basic HDD nine, we must necessarily adopt a newer operating system as Windows 7 or Mac OS X Snow Leopard (Windows Vista, and Tiger / Leopard are supported). With Windows XP, you must either do without the new technology, setting a jumper on the disk, or realign the partition using a utility provided by WD.

A first disk drive is available in Japan, The WD10EARS, a Caviar Green (5400 rpm) 1TB, and featuring 64 MB of cache. It will not exceed 33 decibels of noise, and consumes no more than 5.4 watts. Western Digital would not comment on his performance today.