14 DAY TRIAL // Hard disk drives, as we know them, have a default data block size of 512 bytes, making the smallest sector on the drive 512 bytes in size. All that is about to change because of the initiative of the International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association (IDEMA) which has approved the Long Block Data (LBD) standard on hard drives that increases the size of the default block to 4.096 bytes.
The current 512 byte standard has been around for more than 30 years, and IDEMA put together a committee back in 2000 to work on replacing the standard. There are advantages and disadvantages for this standard, and both rely on the user's requirements. If you are a user who works with documents, spreadsheets, and basically small-size files, then using the 512 byte standard is just what you need, as you will benefit from the small block size.
When creating a file, which is 700 bytes in size, that file will take 512 bytes from the first block, and the rest from the second block. The remaining space from the second block will be considered full, even if it has only about half the size occupied. If that 700-byte file is written on a 4.096 byte data block, the 700 bytes will take up the required space, and the rest will also be considered full. On the other hand, when writing a large file, say a movie, a hard drive writes faster on 4.096 byte sectors than it would on 512 byte sectors because it has to split the data less often.
For the time being, Seagate and Western Digital have taken into consideration that the standard cannot be brought to the market by storm, it has to be eased onto the consumers. That's why they will deliver products that use eight continuous 512 byte blocks, so that the drives could use either 512 or 4.096 byte blocks. The performance growth from using this new technology is said to be very big, thus reducing the format and defragment time, and error rates could be reduced ten-fold.
Joel Weiss, president of IDEMA said: "The primary roadblock we had to overcome was legacy software that requires a 512-byte block size. By facilitating the discussion between both hard disk drive manufacturers and the leaders in operating system and BIOS software, we were able to establish a standard that is now accepted by the software industry and can be implemented in a way that is easily updateable and backward compatible."