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by munkydung 5099 days ago
hopefully this line doesn't use the 'advanced format' abomination
2 comments

Are you referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format?

I'd not heard of it before, and a quick poke at the internet doesn't really show anything beyond a move to 4k sectors (and therefore presumably less efficient storage for lots of small files).

Is there something more I should know about? (in the market for a new home storage box soonish)

You get a huge performance impact if the OS doesn't align the clusters to the sectors. From the wikipedia article:

The translation process is more complicated when writing data that is either not a multiple of 4K or not aligned to a 4K boundary. In these instances, the hard drive must read the entire 4,096-byte sector containing the targeted data into internal memory, integrate the new data into the previously existing data and then rewrite the entire 4,096-byte sector onto the disk media. This operation, known as read-modify-write (RMW), can require additional revolution of the magnetic disks, resulting in a perceptible performance impact to the system user

Most of the OSes correctly align the advanced format sectors.

You'll probably also need to partition it using the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table
Of course they will. I don't think we will see >1TB drives without it.