The industry is a buzz over the impact of hard drive manufacturers transitioning to 4K sectors by January 2011 and it’s impact on users primarily hanging on to Windows XP.

The benefits of moving to 4K sectors:

• Higher capacity with more usable disk space
• Runway for continued hard drive capacity improvements
• Improved data integrity with larger Error Correction (ECC) block sizes

The drawback: Windows XP is not designed to handle 4K sectors and creates drive partition that are not aligned to the 4K format. Furthermore, many popular HDD imaging utilities result in the same problem – unaligned drive partitions, even on Vista or Window 7. Check out a recent BBC article on the subject.  Customers wanting to stretch their IT dollar by upgrading Windows XP systems will have to rely on 4K emulation software built into the drive.  Basically the drive is able to pretend it’s using 512K block sizes. This works great when hard drive partitions are aligned. But if you encounter and unaligned situation (XP or Utility created) your system could suffer a performance hit. Check out these results. Yikes!

The silver lining: yet another reason for a PC Refresh. As long as you format and partition with Windows Vista (SP 1 or older) or Windows 7, partition align is golden. If you or your customers commonly use other software for drive imaging or partitioning, check with your vendor to make sure it is compatible with 4K drives.

This is a huge evolution in hard drive technology. One that is 30 years in the waiting.  Expect hard drive manufacturers like Seagate to spend a lot of time and energy around awareness and education on 4K sectors.

Not likely, but it does make getting a new PC more inviting since I am one of those hangin’ on to Windows XP.