Changes in HDD Sector Usage After 30 Years

freitasm writes "A story on Geekzone tells us that IDEMA (Disk Drive, Equipment, and Materials Association) is planning to implement a new standard for HDD sector usage, replacing the old 512-byte sector with a new 4096-byte sector. The association says it will be more efficient. According to the article Windows Vista will ship with this support already."

Comments

Re:Quick Explain How!

[AngelofDeath-02]

Best analogy is a gym locker room
You have say, 10 lockers up and 20 lockers accross
You can only put one thing in a locker, so you cant put your gym shorts in the same one as your shoes. But if you have lots of socks, you can pile them in, and take up two or three if neccessary.

Space is wasted if you have a really big locker, but it's only holding a sock.

Now, you've got to record where all of this stuff is, or you will take forever to find that sock. So you set asside a locker to hold the clipboard with designations.

Now to bring this back into real life. There are a _lot_ of sectors on a disk. So keeping track of all of them starts requiring a substantial amount of resources. I imagine they are finding it easier to justify wasting space for small files in order to make it easier to keep track of them. Average file sizes are also going up, so it's not as big of a problem as it used to be either. It's all relative...