4KB Sector Hard Drives are Coming

Tom’s Hardware has a great article on the new generation hard drives with 4KB sectors.

The norm has been 512 bytes, but now Western Digital have launched the EARS-series moving 4KB sectors into the mainstream.

Tom’s Hardware has picked a Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB (WD10EARS) hard drive as a case study, and look at its performance amongst many other things and you’ll find that the 10 page article has plenty of benchmarks too.

The spindle speed remains at 5,400 RPM, and power requirements have reached new record lows: 2.8W idle power is less than any other 3.5” drive. Just keep in mind that this 1TB drive utilizes only two platters; three- or four-platter drives would not be this low on power. Active power is slightly higher than on the WD10EADS, but still very low.

Although there are no noticeable benefits for customers today in moving to 4K sectors, the step is an important one. Modern operating systems, such as Windows Vista or Windows 7, can handle different sector sizes and hence are immediately compatible with the modified technology without any performance impact. Older operating systems, such as Windows XP, can be forced to align their 512 byte sectors into the hard drives’ physical ones via tools that relocate partitions to have them start at a suitable sector. This is important to do if you don’t want massive performance impacts on your writes.

You can read the full article here.

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