Exploring Advanced Format Hard Drive Technology

MojoKid writes "Hard drive capacities are sometimes broken down by the number of platters and the size of each. The first 1TB drives, for example, used five 200GB platters; current-generation 1TB drives use two 500GB platters. These values, however, only refer to the accessible storage capacity, not the total size of the platter itself. Invisible to the end-user, additional capacity is used to store positional information and for ECC. The latest Advanced Format hard drive technology changes a hard drive's sector size from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes. This allows the ECC data to be stored more efficiently. Advanced Format drives emulate a 512 byte sector size, to keep backwards compatibility intact, by mapping eight logical 512 byte sectors to a single physical sector. Unfortunately, this creates a problem for Windows XP users. The good news is, Western Digital has already solved the problem and HotHardware offers some insight into the technology and how it performs."

Comments

640 terabytes

[Anonymous Coward]

ought to be enough for anyone

XP users

[spaceyhackerlady]

XP users do not need big hard drives to have problems.

...laura

Re:Large sector size good?

[StikyPad]

If you read the article carefully, the new size is only 4K, not 4096K. The 4K size actually matches very well with most common files ystems.

Looks like they're not the only ones who miscalculated their block boundary.

Re:Large sector size good?

[noidentity]

You want the sector size to be smaller than the average file size or you're going to waste a lot of space. If your average file size is large, and writes are sequential, you want the largest possible sector sizes.

Please take a few moments to notice the amount of redundancy above, and the lack of it in this rewritten version:

You want the sectors to be smaller than average files or you're going to waste a lot of space. If your average files are large, and writes are sequential, you want the largest possible sectors.

In other words, the adjective small implicitly refers to size, so you don't need to say small size, and the same for large.

Re:Dear Slashdot Sales Department

[WrongSizeGlass]

1 No one except LOSERS uses Windows XP.

Beck: I'm a loser, baby, 'cuz I'm usin' XP ...

2. What is Slashdot's commission on these shameful book plugs?

One free page from the book, randomly selected, until they've referred enough people to the publisher's site to receive the entire book. Unfortunately, it arrives as lose pages in no particular order. Cmdr Taco is never pleased with this.

Have a weekend, loozars.

Yours In Tashkent, K. Trout

Thanks, you too.

Re:And for an overview that knows how to do math..

[WrongSizeGlass]

That article doesn't sound like fun at all. How are we supposed to mock it if they haven't made multiple errors, typos and other such blunders? We're smug, semi-knowledgeable 'first posters' with nothing better to do than critique articles that we were too lazy to read or too incompetent to write. I'm going to go wait on the homepage to refresh so I can jump into the next thread without a second thought.

OJFS

[tepples]

From the wikipedia page you linked to: Btrfs

Thanks.

ReiserFS and UFS2 are stable

I was looking for file systems with killer features, not a killer maintainer ;-)

Re:Dear Slashdot Sales Department

[Arthur Grumbine]

Unfortunately, it arrives as lose pages in no particular order. Cmdr Taco is never pleased with this.

Have a weekend, loozars.

For all intensive purposes, you're post should of exploded the heads of any grammar nazis as they read they're screen. Which begs the question of what more damage could possibly be done to effect there sensibilities? Honestly, I could care less.

Re:Dear Slashdot Sales Department

[ryantmer]

Oh, how I wish I had mod points! :)

Re:Dear Slashdot Sales Department

[Arthur Grumbine]

It's "for all intents and purposes" not "for all intensive purposes." When you say it you can get away with it wrong, but when you write it you just look dumb.

Indeed. Its a common mistake, but you're vigilance is dually noted. I'm just glad I didn't loose all credibility by making alot more mistakes.