A new architecture has been developed to increase the space available on a hard drive by reducing the bits wasted with the formatting architecture, which will debut with certain new Western Digital hard drives.

Once upon a time doing IT support as a part time job, and always for family & friends, I can recall the numerous questions about why their hard drive didn’t have all the GB it was supposed to. Those familiar with computers have known for quite some time that for a hard drive to operate, a certain amount of the physical storage media is used for logically organizing all your data.

As you can gather from the picture above, less space is wasted on logically organizing your data and thus more can be dedicated to actually storing it. Western Digital calls this Advanced Format and it can realize 7-11% more space than a drive that uses “legacy” formatting.

From the sound of things, this is an industry standard and not proprietary to Western Digital, so we should see this across all hard drives eventually. The only catch is that Windows XP does not natively support this, but Western Digital does offer a tool to remedy that.

Source: [Western Digital PDF file] via [Geek.com]