By January 2011, all hard drives must shift from the older 512 bytes blocks to 4K format as an agreement with Idema (International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association). Although this change only means good news while producers will deliver more reliable and “greener” hard drives, for Windows XP users might become a problem.

For 30 years, developers format hard drives’ space into blocks sized 512 bytes, this method becoming a standard due to IBM which used it on FDDs. Using this standard was great when hard drives capacities where up to a small amount of megabytes, but lately producers can deliver hardware which seizes 1-2 terabytes and due to this old technology there are is lot of space loss.

Eight times less lost space – that is what producers say moving on to 4K sectors will mean, and also faster, more reliable and less power consuming drives.

Hard drive developers started a promoting campaign for educating people about this move to an advanced standard and to inform about possible conflict problems between this format and older OS like XP.
While Vista, Windows 7, Leopard, X Tiger are all aware about this 4K movement and are prepared to embrace this new technology, Windows XP hit the markets before this decision was taken. Although producers have discovered a method to help XP manage this new standard, performance will take a hit when writing data.

This new drives will simulate that are still using 512 bytes sectors so that when reading data this “trick” will go unobserved, yet when writing data a five milliseconds delay will emerge, producers say.

It is time that will show how this issue will be solved while a lot of Windows XP users are still using this operating system and might encounter problems when this standard will be fully embraced.

Source: mycomputertips

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