Western Digital Advanced Format provides 11 percent extra storage

15th December, 2009 by adina
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Western Digital claims it has developed a new technique that increases the usable space of a hard drive. The technique is known as Advanced Format and reduces the amount of overhead for data sectors by pooling together information. The Advanced Format creates much larger sectors, 4KB-sized, that use one set of each header, instead of a single Sync/DAM header and error correction (ECC) block for each sector. The format needs a larger ECC block but overall provides much more data in a drive. Western Digital believes that a fully formatted drive should have, on average, between 7 percent and 11 percent extra usable storage space than traditionally-formatted drives.

The new formatting technique should launch with the low-power Caviar Green line’s updated version and will expand to its line-up in the next weeks. Operating systems like Linux, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X do not need any special procedures to recognize the new formatted drives, while Windows XP , which has limited file format support needs a special software and perhaps jumper changes in some cases to re-align sectors and be able to use the extra space.


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