Reformatted hard drive format affects Windows XP users

Hard drive technology is going through one of the biggest format changes in 30 years.

By 2011, all hard drives will adopt a new format that consumes less energy and is more reliable. However, Windows XP users will experience some problems when changing their old hard drive to a device that uses the new format.

Performance increase 7-11%

When DOS is still dominant, the hard drive is formatted into blocks of 512 bytes. The 512-byte sector is standardized by IBM - it applies this standard on floppy disks.

Dividing into 512-byte blocks is useful for hard drives of a few Mb size, but the development of technology has brought devices up to 1,000 Gb.

David Burks, Seagate's manager, said: 'Technology has changed but the basic blocks or format of hard drives are not yet'.

He said that the format of the current hard drive is wasteful. Each 512 byte sector has a starting position marker and an area reserved for storing the error correction code.

In addition, there is a small gap between the bows and arrows, so the useful capacity of the hard drive is always smaller than the manufacturer's notice.

Using the new format with 4K sectors will reduce wasted space by 8 times but allow the hard drive to double the space for each block to fix the error.

According to Steve Perkins, technology consultant for Western Digital, the new format saves more hard drive capacity. Performance will also be raised to 7-11%.

Supply from 512 bytes is the standard format of the hard drive since the time of the old DOS operating system.

Windows XP will run slower

Through the International Association of Hard Drive Devices and Materials (Idema), hard drive manufacturers are committed to adopting the new 4K format by the end of January 2011.

There will be a propaganda campaign to help users be aware of new formats and warn possible problems with older operating system users, especially Windows XP because the operating system was born before the 4K format selected.

In contrast, Windows 7, Vista, OS X Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard and core versions of Linux were released after September 2009, so they all fit the new format.

To use Windows XP, the new formatted hard drive will emulate 512-byte sectors for use. When reading data, this simulation is almost ignored.

However, according to Seagate manager David Burks, data logging may have some problems. In some cases, the hard drive performs two steps to write data and therefore, creates a delay of about 5 milliseconds. Burks said the hard drive write speed may be 10% slower in such cases.

To limit the differences between the two formats, manufacturers try to offer software that ensures the arrangement of sectors from 512 bytes to 4K format.