Hard drives get bigger bytes

IDEMA is the International Disk Drive, Equipment and Materials Association. The specification is called the LBD sector standard, which stands for Long Block Data. Rather than writing data in 512 byte chunks, as happens today, drives will start to move to 4,096 byte chunks.

The advantage of a larger block size is that each operation to read and write has a lower performance overhead, since more data can be saved at each location, cutting down on seek times. It's also thought that the standard could reduce error rates. Of course, the downside is more wasted space - where a chunk of data occupies less than 4096 bytes, the space will be dead. But since drive capacities are now in the astronomical ranges, this is hardly a problem.

The majority of drives will support the standard by 2010, IDEMA says, and the phase in will be gradual. Users will need to be using Windows Vista to take advantage of the new drives, although there may be a software update for WinXP. µ