Hard drives are about to undergo one of the biggest changes in the format 30 years ago.

By early 2011, all disks are an advanced format, “that changes how they use during the backup of the data and save the people on them. The conversion to the extended format makes it easier to spend on the hard disk manufacturers to larger drives, less power and produce more reliable.

However, it could mean problems for Windows XP users to change an old drive for a change to the format.

Error Codes

Since the days of the venerable DOS operating system, was the large space on a hard drive formatted in blocks of 512 bytes. The 512-byte sector has been standardized by IBM, which they used on floppy disks. While 512 bytes was useful when hard drives were only a few megabytes in size, it makes little sense when drives can apply one terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) or more of data.

The 512-byte format comes from the days of the floppy disk. “The technology has changed, but that the basic building block of the formatting is not,” said David Burks, a product marketing manager for the storage company Seagate.

This fine resolution on the hard drives is causing the problem, he said, because of the wasted space associated with each small block. Each 512-byte sector has shown a mark where it begins and dedicated a room for storing error correction code. In addition, a small gap between the different sectors has to be released. The large drives, not this wasted space in which data can be saved to take a significant part of the drive.
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