Posted on Monday, December 14 2009 @ 21:50 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
PC Perspective
reports Western Digital will soon roll out the first hard disks with their new Advanced Format partitioning scheme, which improved storage efficiency and boosts error correction ability by 50 percent. An "EARS" version of the Caviar Green line will be rolled out over the next few weeks, other product lines will have to wait a bit longer.
This is a new format method they will be incorporating into their various drive lines. Advanced Format represents a new way for their drives to handle data internally. Instead of each individual sector having its own Sync/header and ECC, the new format will move to larger physical sectors, in this case 4k. This results in an overall net gain in storage efficiency, so much so that Western Digital was able to save on wasted space even after shifting to a larger ECC block size. Larger ECC is a good thing, as Error Correcting Code is used to detect and correct bit errors that occur within each physical sector. The new ECC block size should translate to a 50% improvement in error correction ability.
