Now comes to hard drives switching topics from adult sites as hard drives are about to go a very major development in respect of formatting in course of last 30 years. By early 2011 all hard drives would go under an advance format that would change the course and manner by which data is saved on hard drives.

Advance format move would let the hard drive manufacturers to produce bigger drives which consume less power and on the department of trust they are more reliable. This may create problems for Windows XP users who swap an old drive for one with the changed format.

As it is quite clear and well in views of others that since the days of DOS operating system the entire space is divided into blocks 512 bytes in size. As 512 byte blocking was useful only when there was only a drives with only a few megabytes size. But drives with standardized sizes like 1000 gigabytes having 512 byte are irrelevant. Now switching to an advanced format of 4K sectors means eight time less wasted space however let drives to contribute as much as space per block for having error correction. This shift on hard drive let better use of real estate on a hard drive.

By the mean of International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association (Idema) all hard drive manufacturers are about to switch to 4K advanced format by the end of January 2011. Hard drive makers at the same time have also started people educating about the advanced format so they can be aware of problems as occurring over users of older operating systems like as Windows XP. And this problem occurs with Windows XP as it was released before any decision over 4K format.

Otherwise Windows 7, Vista, OS X Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard and versions of the Linux kernel have been released after September 2009 and all are 4K aware. To help Windows XP cope, advanced format drives can also pretend to be operational with 512 bytes in size.