Western Digital have announced it will be using a new storage format that will allow users to enjoy up to 11% more capacity on its upcoming drives. While that may not sound like much, it would mean up to 50GB extra space on a 500GB drive – who are we to argue with being able to cram a few more holiday snaps and videos on our machines anyway?

 

According to a white paper published by the storage giants, WD have been able to create this Advanced Format – as it shall now be known – by taking advantage of the available space in each drive and increasing its bit density. Blocks of 8 ECC (error code information), that currently requires a lot of overhead, will be merged into a pooled single block, along with sync/DAM headers and inter-sector gaps. Come about due to the change in the industries use of 512 byte sectors to larger 4096 bytes, the result is to free a fair amount of previously inefficient space, and to provide better error correction by 50%.

 

Currently, only the Western Digital Caviar Green uses this format, and unfortunately you cannot format existing drives to Advanced Format. WD has, however, stated that it will be incorporating it into a number of its upcoming drives; we will expect to see a larger number of HDD’s with this format pretty soon.

 

For people thinking about purchasing a Cavier Green drive, be sure to check out their website and download the Align utility to ensure the best performance and compatibility with older operating systems

 

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