As hard drives become larger in storage capacity, the areal density (amount of bits manufacturers can stuff on the physical platter) needs to increase as well, which introduces more noise when reading data.
A consortium of hard drive manufacturers (IDEMA) are now pushing to increase the sector sizes from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes. This change means faster seek times and larger capacity. The downside translates to more slack space, but with larger hard drive capacity does it really matter? Probably not to the consumer, but it’ll be interesting to see how much more time this will add to forensics work.
Link to a IDEMA’s whitepaper for more detail.
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