Western Digital has recently unveiled the "Advanced Format Structure", a new formatting method that saves 7 to 11% of storage space on a hard disk formatted. It will appear on the Caviar Black family in the coming weeks, before being extended to the whole range. The process, operating at very low levels, can unfortunately not be applied to existing hard drives, even through an update of their firmware (firmware).
With this method, the physical sectors of hard drives just go from 512 to 4096 bytes. Each sector is introduced by a block header and signed by a block of error correction size unchanged, the usable space is increased. In fact, the ECC block has even been enlarged, improving the correction rate of 50%.
Conversely, any operation requires the rewriting of entire sectors of 4k, at the expense of operations that involve many small files, but the benefit, however, large file transfers.
The modern operating systems like Windows 7, Windows Vista, Mac OS X Tiger or later and Linux take advantage of this innovation by default. Windows XP, however, suffers from a gap area and requires the use of an alignment tool or the establishment of a jumper (jumper) on the hard disk.
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