I think this is worth it's own thread. This drive uses the advanced 4k sector advanced format but as many have found out even if you format it as 4k in Windows 7 which is a 4k sector aware OS, the OS still reports the drive as 512byte sector (check with HDTune).
Anyway, Seagate has this document which explains it all.(http://seagate.com/docs/pdf/whitepap...4k_sectors.pdf).
At page 6 it explains why the drive are not natively 4k sector aligned but are 4k sector with emulation which is also on the Samsung spec sheet for the F4. What this refers to is the process of translating from the 4K physical sectors used in Advanced Format to the legacy 512-byte sectors expected by host computing systems. For XP and older OS's it's a problem as the drive is not aligned properly after you format it, unless you use a partitioning tool which supports this 4k sector format. Apparently for Windows 7 it's fine as Windows 7 creates partitions with Alignment 0 condition (aligned). There is still the question of slowdown due to emulation though.
What I'd like to know though is if I have to go back and reformat all my F4's since default condition which I selected in disk manager is 512 bytes ?
Anyway, Seagate has this document which explains it all.(http://seagate.com/docs/pdf/whitepap...4k_sectors.pdf).
At page 6 it explains why the drive are not natively 4k sector aligned but are 4k sector with emulation which is also on the Samsung spec sheet for the F4. What this refers to is the process of translating from the 4K physical sectors used in Advanced Format to the legacy 512-byte sectors expected by host computing systems. For XP and older OS's it's a problem as the drive is not aligned properly after you format it, unless you use a partitioning tool which supports this 4k sector format. Apparently for Windows 7 it's fine as Windows 7 creates partitions with Alignment 0 condition (aligned). There is still the question of slowdown due to emulation though.
What I'd like to know though is if I have to go back and reformat all my F4's since default condition which I selected in disk manager is 512 bytes ?