The hard drive industry is currently transitioning from a traditional 512-byte sector to a new Advanced Format with a 4kb sector. Seagate Technology will be introducing its SmartAlign technology to its new Advanced Format hard drives to help customers with the transition.
The hard drive industry is currently transitioning from a traditional 512-byte sector to a new Advanced Format with a 4kb sector. Seagate Technology will be introducing its SmartAlign technology to its new Advanced Format hard drives to help customers with the transition.
Although Advanced Format drives have a 4k sector, they still need to emulate 512k sectors in some instances. The host controller handles the translation between 4k physical sectors and 512k logical sectors. This can result in partition misalignment and cause poor performance.
Seagate’s SmartAlign technology automatically manages misaligned partitions in real-time inside the hard drive without the need for any software utilities.
All major hard drive manufacturers have agreed to transition to the Advanced Format with 4k sectors for notebook and desktop hard drives introduced after 1 Jan 2011.
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