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WD's 'Advanced Format' Caviar Green HDD gets benchmarked, minor benefits found
Western Digital has yet to actively market its "advanced format" hard drives -- in fact, there's a decent chance you've no idea what we're talking about if you weren't tuned in on December 11th. In short, it's a technology that alters a hard drive's sector size from 512 bytes (the standard for the past three decades) to 4096K, which enables the ECC data to be stored in a more efficient manner. Just recently, WD began to ship Advanced Format Caviar Green hard drives, and the benchmarking gurus over at Hot Hardware strapped one in to see exactly how much of the hype was warranted. For starters, they debunked the thought that Advanced Format drives offered more usable space; Windows reported 931GB of free space on both AF and non-AF 1TB drives. They also go on to explain how to make AF drives play nice with Windows XP, and on the testing front, they found that an aligned AF Caviar Green drive could (mostly) hang with the higher end (and more expensive) Caviar Black. Pop that source link for the full skinny, particularly if you're a WinXP user looking to snag a new drive.
Western Digital 'advanced format' promises slight boost in usable space
Sure, you may have been able to double your hard drive's storage space with DriveSpace back in the day, but it looks like Western Digital has now come up with a new, more foolproof way to eek out a few more gigabytes from its drives. Dubbed 'advanced format,' the company's new partitioning method promises to do away with each individual sector having its own Sync/DAM header and ECC, and instead move to larger, 4k physical sectors. As you can see in the helpful illustration above, that shift would also actually increase the size of the ECC, but WD says the net gain in usable storage space should still be between seven and eleven percent (which would certainly be welcome when we're talking about 1TB or 2TB drives). Unfortunately, you won't simply be able to update the firmware and reformat your current drive, but WD will apparently be moving its Caviar Green line to the new format in the "next few weeks," and eventually shift the rest of its drives over as well.
