Western Digital is touting new hard disk drive formatting that will save space. It’s something to consider as you’re looking at backup storage space. The new feature is called Advanced Format and Western Digital says it will give you 7-11% greater capacity on disk drives. Other drive manufacturers are expected to use Advanced Format to get more out of their hard drives as well.

This technique takes advantage of changes in the industry in drive sector sizes and consolidates overhead information to free up additional space for data storage. As a result of Advanced Format, a 1TB drive could potentially gain more than 100GB in capacity.

Regardless of the type of disk drive you choose, you can backup your data to that drive using StorageCraft ShadowProtect. ShadowProtect is disk-based technology that allows you to backup your systems and data on servers and PCs that are running Windows. With advancements in disk drives, and with the cost of disk space dropping all the time, backing up everything in your computing environment has never been easier or more affordable.

Plus, ShadowProtect backup software is designed so you can set it and forget it. You can schedule your backups as frequently as every 15 minutes, and schedule ShadowProtect to take full backups once a day or once a week and incremental backups of just the changes every other time. The new format techniques will make it easier than ever to ensure that you won’t run out of disk space for your backups any time soon.