IDEMA is an organization for harddrive manufacturers and through which the manufacturers can unite on new standards. The latest standard to become finalized is LBD (Long Block Data). This is an increase of the 512 bytes per sector that we have today, to 4096 bytes instead. In real life this will result in higher reliability, higher transfer rates, shorter time to format and shorter maintenance periods. This standard has been under development since 2000, but have required a lot of work since it has to be backwards compatible with the current 512 byte standard. Well now they’ve completed the standard and the only thing that the end-users will notice is a gain in performance.
The fact that it has been under development for 7 years may sound like a long time, but considering we’ve used the current standard for more than 30 years it’s still a relatively short period of time.
The harddrive manufacturers will start developing harddrives based on the new standard immediately and in 2010 all new harddrives are expected to use LBD. Up until then we will have transition period where we will still have the older 512 byte harddrives and watch the 4096 bytes versions arrive one by one.
Both Seagate and Western Digital have presented alternative solutions to the backwards compatibility by using 8 sequential 512 bytes blocks. Both Linux and Windows Vista have support for the longer data blocks and all BIOS developers already have or will release updates for LBD.
