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Overheard at Fry's, a guy advising his friend to be careful in partitioning high density drives to be aligned to multiples of cylinder ( or something ) boundaries otherwise the HDD firmware/hardware would be busy constantly adjusting offsets during reads and writes?

I also heard him use the term "4K cluster sizes".

I assume almost all the >500GB drives fall under the high density category?

Is this partitioning caveat true?

What is the story/reason behind this ( even if this is no longer applicable for newer hardrives ) ?

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1 Answer

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They were talking about Advanced Format hard drives. Not all hard drives have this feature.

http://hothardware.com/Reviews/WDs-1TB-Caviar-Green-w-Advanced-Format-Windows-XP-Users-Pay-Attention/

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/advancedformat/

http://support.wdc.com/product/downloadsw.asp?sid=124

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=805

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Great answer! This is only for such WDC Drives or do other vendors make them as well? – PoorLuzer Oct 24 '10 at 0:49
Eventually all makes will move to this technology, not sure who has and has not so far, see this article....bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2010/02/02/… – Moab Oct 24 '10 at 2:04

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