As far back as 1998, IBM started indicating to the hard disk manufacturing community that sectors would have to be enlarged to allow for robust error correction. In 2000, IDEMA, the International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association, put together a task force to establish a large sector standard, the Long Data Block Committee. After initially considering, but ultimately rejecting, a 1024-byte interim format, in March 2006, they finalized their specification and committed to 4096 byte sectors. Phoenix produced preliminary BIOS support for the specification in 2005, and Microsoft, for its part, ensured that Windows Vista would support the new sector size. Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2 all support the new sector size. MacOS X supports it, and Linux kernels since September 2009 also support it.
