All new hard drives will be "4k advanced format"
Western Digital's Advanced Format drives are currently limited to its large Green Series 'EARS' products
After dropping Seagate a line to ask whether they were planning models on the new format to challenge WD, we were informed that the whole industry is behind the transition that is taking place right now. Good to know!
To quote Seagate PR directly: "International Disk Drive Materials and Equipment Association (IDEMA) have agreed that beginning January 1, 2011 all new product releases with SATA interfaces will support Advanced Formatted media."
The 4KB sector size is an advancement from the 512Byte sector size that all hard drives (as in, mechanical media) have adhered to for the longest time. The larger sector bring efficiency advantages because as the total size of drives increase, less sectors have to be used, and less ECC data overall has to be written, physical saving space. The downside is that there are issues of compatibility with older operating systems, however the drives will contain a "512B emulation mode" (at a performance loss) for the foreseeable future.
We're currently waiting on a new 'EARS' drive from Western Digital to arrive so we can test the differences.
Have you bought a 4k advanced format drive yet? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.
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Discuss in the forums ReplySee the piece at AnandTech for the techie detail - http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3691&cp=4
@kenco... maybe you missed that little paragraph in the article :)
Yes it affects speed.. in a good way. With bigger sectors means that for the same file or data you need to write less sectors :) while space will be used more efficiently (less sectors = less fragmented data).
I think you misunderstood the article, for the example you say it wouldbe 2 TB divided into sectors of 4 Kb, where the data will be stored.
So which is it? 2010? or 2011? or is the segate PR quote refering to something else?
But I'm a grammer nazi and there's a grammatical error in the sentence quoted, so unfortunately I didn't understand it :p
That's my excuse and I'mma stick to it.
With MBR limited to 2TB I was wondering what was going to happen on that front.....
Uhh, no. Your 2Tb disk will NOT become a 2.4Tb disk. Rather, if you have a 2Tb disk (let's forget for a second that manufacturers talk about disk space in power of 10, while the actual space is in powers of 2, which means an advertised 2Tb will show up in your OS as 1.86Tb), with the old format you'd be able to use only 2*0.87 = 1.75Tb due to cluster overhead. The new format lets you utilize 2*0.96 = 1.92Tb.
No way to make that hard drive you bought have more sectors.
Thanks to your explanation I understood the matter a bit better. It seems advantageous, why not?! btw, how much a new hard drive with that EARS thingy?
About £10-15 more, but that's also because the Green drives also have a cache upgrade from 32-64MB too.
I'll let you know the performance difference in a few weeks - we've got a 1TB drive from WD on the way to compare it to the older EADS 1TB. :)
No, the physical sector sizes are always 512Byte, but the virtual ones are 64KB. The drive does the calculation of virtual to physical data when it deals with OS requests. It's the same if NTFS is 4KB and the drive is 512Byte, like it has been for years. Technically 4KB drive and 4KB disk = performance advantage due to less calculation time.
Using GPT (Vista, Windows 7) you can create partitions bigger than 2TB but on Vista you can't boot from GPT. Not sure if this is fixed on Windows 7 or not.
This is again up to the firmware. BIOS vs UEFI. When will they upgrade to UEFI? Wasn't MSI all up to that a while back? then they went silent about it.
you mean a 2tb disc will be closer to actually being 2tb, since the marketing label versus actualy bytes is different number system. So it would be closer to the marketing label which will be nice. Be interesting to see the benches on these. :)
Now, HDD platters are the sizes they are so that drive manufacturers can hit specific marketing targets - a drive with 3 x 333GB platters allows them to describe a drive as 1TB, which is much nicer sounding than 960GB using 3 x 320GB platters or 1.05TB using 3 x 350GB platters. With 4k formatting, the *same* physical platter provides more data storage because the drive's internal overheads for sector lead-in and ECC are reduced. The space efficiency is derived at controller level, and a platter that would give 333GB in a 512 byte sector drive might provide (say) 400GB in a 4k sector drive. However, at least in the short term, there's no way the manufacturers are going to re-tool to adjust to the requisite platters for nice round number drive sizes using 4k format. This means they'll be churning out 3 x (say) 400GB drives. Whether this will be marketed as 1TB (with couple of hundred extra GBs as a bonus) or a 1.2TB drive remains to be seen, but I expect the latter. So for a couple of generations we might get 1.2TB, 1.8TB and 2.4TB 4k sector drives where previously there were 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB 512 byte sector drives, but after that I expect they'll have readjusted for new platter sizes and we'll be back to nice round numbers for the 3TB, 4TB and 5TB drives we can look forward to.
As ever, apologies for the rambling nature of this post...
The problem here is the incorrect use of words.
512 bytes is the physical disk sector size.
64KB is the CLUSTER size of the filesystem.
Clusters are blocks of sectors used to store files or file fragments.
^True.. tho I gotta say I have never had problems regarding bad sectors :\ or any hard drive issue at all.
Lucky, lucky person!
Tbh, if you get bad sectors the whole drive is going to have an RMA eventually tbh.
true, either way this will be great, cant wait to see how it all plays out.
Has Samsung said they are going to be doing this?
Or are they already and not told anyone?
-J