What will the new hard drive format mean for Pro Tools?

[razorboy]

BBC NEWS
Hard drive evolution could hit XP
By Mark Ward
technology correspondent, BBC News
BBC News - Hard drive evolution could hit Microsoft XP users
Published: 2010/03/09 11:29:38 GMT
© BBC MMX



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

By early 2011 all hard drives will use an "advanced format" that changes how they go about saving the data people store on them.

The move to the advanced format will make it easier for hard drive makers to produce bigger drives that use less power and are more reliable.

However, it might mean problems for Windows XP users who swap an old drive for one using the changed format.

Error codes

Since the days of the venerable DOS operating system, the space on a hard drive has been formatted into blocks 512 bytes in size.

The 512 byte sector became standardised thanks to IBM which used it on floppy disks.

While 512 bytes was useful when hard drives were only a few megabytes in size, it makes less sense when drives can hold a terabyte (1000 gigabytes), or more of data.

"The technology has changed but that fundamental building block of formatting has not," said David Burks, a product marketing manager for storage firm Seagate.

This fine resolution on hard drives is causing a problem, he said, because of the wasted space associated with each tiny block.

Each 512 byte sector has a marker showing where it begins and an area dedicated to storing error correction codes. In addition a tiny gap has to be left between each sector. In large drives this wasted space where data cannot be stored can take up a significant proportion of the drive.

Moving to an advanced format of 4K sectors means about eight times less wasted space but will allow drives to devote twice as much space per block to error correction.

"You can get yourself into a corner where you cannot squeeze much more onto the disk," said Steve Perkins, a technical consultant for Western Digital.

This shift also allows manufacturers to make more efficient use of the real estate on a hard drive.

"We can put more data on the disk," he said. "It's about 7-11% more efficient as a format."

Slow down

Through the International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association (Idema) all hard drive makers have committed to adopting the 4K advanced format by the end of January 2011.

Hard drive makers have begun an education and awareness campaign to let people know about the advanced format and to warn about the problems it could inflict on users of older operating systems such as Windows XP.

This is because Windows XP was released before the 4K format was decided upon.

"The 512 byte sector assumption is ensconced into a lot of the aspects of computer architecture," said Mr Burks from Seagate.

By contrast, Windows 7, Vista, OS X Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard and versions of the Linux kernel released after September 2009 are all 4K aware.

To help Windows XP cope, advanced format drives will be able to pretend they still use sectors 512 bytes in size.

When reading data from a drive this emulation will go unnoticed. However, said Mr Burks, in some situations writing data could hit performance.

In some cases the drive will take two steps to write data rather than one and introduce a delay of about 5 milliseconds.

"All other things being equal you will have a noticeable hard drive reduction in performance," said Mr Burks, adding that, in some circumstances, it could make a drive 10% slower.

In a bid to limit the misalignment, hard drive makers are producing software that ensures 512 sectors line up with 4K ones.

Those most likely to see the performance problems are those building their own computers or swapping out an old drive for one that uses the new format.

[browniespeaks]

just had a hard drive fail in the middle of a session pain in the rear yes, but in looking at the whats new in the world i ran across this 2 month old post with no replies. Any news moving forward on this?

[Dism]

Originally Posted by browniespeaks

just had a hard drive fail in the middle of a session pain in the rear yes, but in looking at the whats new in the world i ran across this 2 month old post with no replies. Any news moving forward on this?

The news is... 2011. But this will apply to new hard drives.

But... since Pro Tools is officially dropping XP after 8.0.4, and MS has also said they plan to drop support for XP within the year... It looks like 7 will be the future.

[Craig F]

I got to believe that some of the old format drives will still be made.
You can still buy IDE drives.
They'll be more expensive and harder to find but some will still be around.

[Dism]

Originally Posted by Craig F

I got to believe that some of the old format drives will still be made.
You can still buy IDE drives.
They'll be more expensive and harder to find but some will still be around.

Well of course. Just like old RAM these days.

You could still get RAM and hard drives for old G4's if you want, but I like the idea of more efficient drives. I'm excited to see how the next year goes for computing.

[John H]

With the HFS+ format being the standard for over a decade, the Mac hasn't had to worry about large file sizes since BEFORE OS X and we were still manually allocating memory and "co-operatively" multitasking.

It's amazing the PC world "catching up" is worthy of a BBC News item

Also, doesn't it sound a little bit like old news anyway. SSDs are the future.

The fact SSDs are getting faster and cheaper all the time, they're at least an option for boot drives and those "Hybrid" drives are only going to get better. Imagine a 10,000 RPM drive with no cache but an intelligent controller that automatically moves the most recently accessed files to an SSD portion of the drive but with much higher capacities than we have now. kind of like a cross between a sandforce based SSD and a Raptor? 50Gb of SSD with 28% over-provisioning as the "cache" part of the drive and multiple terabytes of conventional hard drive with most of the capacity still being available for storage.

You could see drives like this fairly cheaply within a year or 2 in 7200 rpm form with 10K server class drives with lower capacities designed for RAID available too:

1TB (50Gb SSD Cache)
2Tb (100Gb SSD Cache)
4Tb (200Gb SSD Cache)

[Chmiola]

Hey guys, I wanted to report that my studio has been having some troubles with the newest "Advanced Format" Western Digital drives and our HD systems. We've been using 1 TB western digital green SATA drives in firewire caddies for some time now with no issue. This past week we purchased new drives and both our HD systems have issues with them. One system is a G5 with 10.5 and fully updated PT8 (as far as powerpc will update) and the other is a G5 with OS 10.3 and PT 6.4.

The PT 6.4 system records fine and but gets the drive too slow errors when trying to punch in, and the PT 8 has huge lag times when recording in punch mode and has had recording drop outs on a system that's been rock solid.

I haven't had any time to really dive in and figure out if it's the combination of drives/firewire controller, or drive / G5 macs, or something else. If anyone else is using one of these drives please let me know.

If you've purchased an "Advanced Format" Western Digital drive recently make sure you give it a full testing out before starting a session with it.

[Craig F]

the WD green drives are not good for our kind of work
get the WD black drives