A Brief Introduction of Advanced Format

Advanced Format can help to greatly increase the storage space.

This article will give you a brief introduction about Advanced Format.

if you don’t know what Advanced Format is, you may check out this post.

Overview

The InternationalDisk DriveEquipment Materials Association uses the Advanced Format to name a new data structure form.

The advanced format technology defines the basic size of all disk sectors.

And it also known as 4K Advanced Format.

Advanced Format can help to greatly increase the storage space.

It adopts the latest firmware to perfectly serve the operating system and other facilities.

For a long time, the hard disk uses 512 byte sectors to read and store data.

For compatibility reasons, WD will divide the 4KB physical sector into eight 512-byte logical sectors.

Thus, as long as the partition is correct, there will be no performance problems.

In addition, it also provides the improved error correction capabilities.

Here, 1T/3TB per platter hard drive must adopt the 4K Advanced Format technology.

Hard drive manufactures launched the 4K Advanced Format hard drive.

Whats worse, the manufactures left these matters to customers.

For the 4K Alignment problems, manufactures widely adopt 512 bytes virtualization.

They used the4K Alignmentsoftware.

Besides, it will not damage the drive performance.

Even partitions are unaligned, SmartAlign technology can help to automatically fix this problem.

Western Digital/HGST/Toshiba: it needs much time to realize the 4K-Alignment via software.

And we encourage Windows 7/8 users to use this drive.