Advanced Format Drives

Ever since hard drives were first developed and used over fifty years ago, the data held in them has been stored in the same manor. Up until the emergence of Advanced Format Drives, hard drives would store data in 512 or 520 byte sectors. A sector being the section of a hard drive disk track where chunks of data are stored. Recently a need has been addressed for the development of larger drives and increased data storage. Advanced format drives combine eight of the older 512 byte sectors into single, larger 4096 byte sectors.

On a traditional drive, after each sector of data was filled, there was additional data added for error correction, addressing, and other functions. By combining these smaller pockets of data into larger advanced format data sectors, the amount of additional data needed is significantly reduced thus making more room for actual storage.

 

What this means is that a traditional 500GB hard drive, if switched over to Advanced Formatting, will be expanded to roughly 550GB. Of course the hard drive will be shipped already formatted, so the amount of drive space that is advertised is the actual drive space that you will get. This new formatting technique will give manufacturers the ability to produce larger and larger drives for us as consumers in the future.
For the most part, the Advanced Format drives should be Plug-and-Play. However, in some cases they will require a driver to be installed. It all depends on the drive manufacturer and the operating system of the computer.