2011 large-capacity sector hard disk acceleration WinXP dies

In the near future, in order to save hard disk storage space, the storage capacity of each sector of the hard disk will be increased from the original 512 bytes to 4KB bytes, but according to one of the BBC The report pointed out that the emergence of 4KB large-capacity hard disk per sector in the future may lead to the demise of the Windows XP operating system.

In the hard disk, each sector has a record data area dedicated to store the start and end position information of the sector and the ECC error correction information, which cannot be used to store user data. Thus, for a hard disk of the same capacity, the smaller the number of bytes per sector, the more the number of sectors, and the larger the space occupied by these recorded data areas, the 4KB byte sector hard disk saves the hard disk. The advantage of capacity compared to 512-byte sector hard drives. In addition, the hard disk with this design also has certain advantages in terms of power saving. It is reported that the hard disk designed with this 4KB sector capacity will be available early next year.

However, Windows XP and earlier operating systems have experienced performance degradation when using this new hard disk without considering the change in hard disk sector capacity. These operating systems read the hard disk in a 512-byte per sector design. If the hard disk has a sector capacity of 4 KB, you need to install the driver of the hard disk manufacturer (such as Western Digital's Advanced Format Align Utility). The hard disk is read normally, and some hard disk cloning software cannot support this hard disk format independently, and it needs to be supported by other conversion drivers.

Of course, a 4KB sector capacity hard disk can also work in the form of an analog 512-byte capacity hard disk. However, under certain conditions, some write performance will be discounted. According to the BBC, the Seagate product market is cited. Manager David Burks said that it is likely to cause up to 5ms of extra latency and performance down to 10%.

However, Windows Vista/Windows7/Mac OSX Tiger/Mac OSX Leopard/Mac OSX Snow Leopard are well-supported for this new technology, and Linux released after September 2009. The kernel can also support this technology. However, according to OSNews, if a Linux user creates a hard disk partition starting from an odd multiple of 512 bytes, the operating system may have some failures.