Hard Disk Drive Organization Announces a New Sector Length Standard

Dr. Ed Grochowski, executive director of IDEMA US, reported that adopting a 4K-byte sector length facilitates further increases in data density for hard drives which will increase storage capacity for users while continuing to reduce cost per gigabyte.

"Increasing areal density of newer magnetic hard disk drives requires a more robust error correction code (ECC), and this can be more efficiently applied to 4096 byte sector lengths," explained Dr. Martin Hassner from Hitachi GST and IDEMA Committee member. "Today, hard drives are a major storage product for essentially all computer and consumer applications, and increased capacities are required to meet customer needs for more storage."

The IDEMA Long Data Block Committee was composed of members representing the major hard drive developers, as well as electronics and software companies. The Microsoft Corporation participated in this Committee and plans to include a 4K-byte sector capability in their upcoming operating system named Windows Vista. The Committee foresees the first hard drive products becoming available later this year or in 2007, and is asking the computer industry to recognize this new standard and prepare for its availability. Backward compatibility with existing 512-byte products, both in hardware and in software, will be defined and accommodated during the phase over period. It is projected that most disk drives will be eventually formatted for 4K-byte sectors.

About IDEMA

Now celebrating its 20-year anniversary, The International Disk Drive, Equipment and Materials Association (IDEMA), is the trade association for the $30 Billion disk drive industry, representing 340 member companies in the personal computing, enterprise, and consumer electronic storage with offices in Sunnyvale, CA, Singapore, and Tokyo, Japan. IDEMA's mission is to promote communications within its industry members via technical conferences as well as to identify new standards to facilitate progress for future disk drive products. Visit http://www.idema.org for more information.