Western Digital�s Advanced Format: The 4K Sector Transition Begins

"Ahead of the impending launch of the first Advanced Format drives, Western Digital is engaging in an education campaign about the technology, as it represents the first step in a general transition for hard drives, and is a transition that can't be done completely behind the scenes. Specifically, Advanced Format is going to bring about some issues where older operating systems (and we're looking almost exclusively at Windows XP here) will inadvertently harm drive performance by making certain assumptions about the drives that will no longer be true.

"We'll get in to the nitty-gritty about the impact of this in a bit, but first let's start with Advanced Format. What is it? In a nutshell, it's replacing the traditional 512 byte hard drive sector with a 4 kilobyte (4,096B) hard drive sector for a number of practical and technological reasons. Advanced Format is the name Western Digital is giving to drives implementing 4KB sectors.

"The move to 4K-sectors has been some 10 years in the making, as research in the late 90's identified that 512B sectors made less and less sense as drives continued to get larger. At a time when hard drives were measured in megabytes, 512B sectors were a good balance between technical factors and a desire to keep wasted space at a minimum (you can't normally put 2 files in 1 sector), but times have changed and hard drive capacities are several orders of magnitude larger."

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