The most critical aspect of a smooth and successful transition to 4K sectors used in Advanced Format has been to promote the use of 4K-aware hard drive partitioning tools. The key to a smooth transition has been a well-educated storage community, so that potential performance pitfalls can be avoided. Large sector aware but creates partitions incorrectly (unaligned)Ĭreates partitions with Alignment 0 condition (aligned) Operating System ReleaseĬreates primary partition with Alignment 1 condition (unaligned) Table 2 describes the situation relative to current generations of the Microsoft Windows OS. Software that creates partitions of Alignment 0 (those that work well with the Advanced Format standard) is referred to as “4K aware”. Consequently, they released 4K-sector-compatible software beginning with Windows Vista Service Pack 1. Microsoft was involved with the community planning the transition to larger sectors. In the case of partitions created with the Windows OS, there are three Windows releases that warrant discussion: Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Still, it’s recommended that system designers consider proper modifications to any of these processes to maximise performance when making the 4K transition. Generally, these occur in small enough numbers that overall performance is not significantly impacted.

These are typically OS-level activities dealing with the file systems, journalling or similar low-level activities. These occur in rare instances where the host makes discrete write requests that are actually smaller than 4K. There are, however, certain low-level processes that can force a hard drive to deal with runt situations that are not associated with unaligned partitions. As long as hard drive partitions are aligned, the hard drive can easily map 512-byte sectors into 4K sectors without any performance penalties.

Therefore, hard drives can store these write requests in cache until there are enough sequential 512-byte blocks to build a 4K sector. In modern computing applications, data such as documents, pictures, and video streams are much larger than 512 bytes.

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