Hard drive manufacturers are prepared to cause a major hardware shakeup when they begin using a new "advanced format" designed to allow HDDs more storage capacity while increasing reliability and energy consumption.
The International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association (IDEMA) said all HDD manufacturers have made an agreement to switch to the new format next year. By the end of 2011, however, not all HDDs sold will use this advanced format, so XP users will still have a choice as to what products they purchase.
Since DOS became available many years ago, HDDs have utilized 512 byte sectors -- and this became standardized when it was used on floppy disks by IBM. This sector layout is far less feasible now that HDDs can top 1TB. Manufacturers plan to switch up to 4,000 byte sectors so that HDDs have eight times less wasted space than today's HDDs.
The new advanced format will provide 7 to 11% additional space on the HDD, since it's so much more efficient than current technologies.
A study conducted last month indicates almost 66% of PCs across the world use Windows XP, while 16.5% use Windows Vista, while 9% are already using Windows 7. XP is not designed to handle the HDD hardware upgrade, so this could lead to Windows 7 picking up new users.
But technology can't sit still or fall behind due to the slowest kid in the room (XP), so I find these advanced hard drive technologies to be a welcome addition to the ever evolving computing industry.
