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Exploring Advanced Format Hard Drive Technology

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the lift-the-hood-once-in-a-while dept.

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."

2 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. What About Linux Systems? by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 4, Interesting

    When this issue came up a few weeks ago there was a problem with XP and with Linux. I see they tackled the XP issue pretty quick but what about Linux?

    This place had something about it.

  2. Speed is irrelevant by UBfusion · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I can't grasp why all (these specific and most) benchmarks are so much obsessed with speed. Regarding HDs, I'd like to see results relevant to:

    1. Number of Read/Write operations per task: Does the new format result in fewer head movements, therefore less wear on the hardware, thus increasing HD's life expectancy and MTBF?

    2. Energy efficiency: Does the new format have lower power consumption, leading to lower operating temperature and better laptop/netbook battery autonomy?

    3. Are there differences in sustained read/write performance? E.g. is the new format more suitable for video editing than the old one?

    For me, the first issue is the more important than all, given that owning huge 2T disks is in fact like playing Russian roulette: without proper backup strategies, you risk all your data at once.