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What is Advanced Format Technology?

Whenever I buy a new hard drive such as 1 terabytes (TB), put it into my computer and format it, it's usually less than 1 TB of usable data. There is a new type of formating technology that increases the sector size from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes.  The larger 4k sectors can yield disk space increase of 7 - 11%.  So for a 1 TB drive, it can potentially yield an additional 100 GB.

Western Digital is the first hard drive manufacturer to implement this technlogy. It's supported natively in Windows 7 and MacOS but also works for Windows Vista and Windows XP.  It will be implementable with a clean install only, as the actual sector allocation occurs at very low levels, which means that current drives won't be able to enact such a formatting procedure via firmware.
Depending on the configuration, users may have to make use of the WD Align utility and apply a jumper on pins 7-8 (for windows XP).

As an additional benefit, Advanced Format can increase data integrity by providing a more efficient error correction scheme using longer ECC code words. This improves error correction by 50% according to WD

More information, with the exact procedure for each OS, as well as a download service for the WD Align utility may be found here.

An indepth article is located at Anandtech.

The whitepaper is found here.

Kevin Liang
CTO / SEO Guru
Canadian Web Hosting
http://www.canadianwebhosting.com/