Storage Products Top ＞ Storage Innovation ＞ advanced format
Advanced Format (AF) is a new standard that improves formatting efficiency by increasing the length of HDD data sectors to be longer than their traditional size of 512 bytes. The Advanced Format standard was drafted by Toshiba and other HDD manufacturers in cooperation with the International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association (IDEMA).
By establishing the Advanced Format standard, IDEMA aims to ensure that the storage devices supplied by various companies will be compatible with future file systems as well as operating systems (OS).
Advanced Format improves formatting efficiency by reducing unnecessary headers, thereby increasing the reliability of recorded data through powerful error detection and correction algorithms.
The Generation One Advanced Format standards stipulate a sector size of 4,096 bytes (4KB). This means eight sectors of the conventional unit of 512 bytes are contained within a single sector.
The dvanced Format standard includes 512-byte emulation functionality in order to maintain compatibility with applications or hardware which demand conventional 512-byte sector configurations. During emulation, when data is sent to the disk in increments of 512 bytes to be written, the data is converted before writing into 4KB units.
Toshiba provides a partition alignment tool (PAT: Partition Alignment Tool for Toshiba HDDs by Paragon Software K.K.) to allow Toshiba Generation One Advanced Format HDDs to be used with Windows® XP or other OSes or applications that do not support Advanced Format. For more information on how PAT interacts with Toshiba Advanced Format HDDs, see "PAT (Partition Alignment Tool) and Toshiba HDDs" below.
PAT (Partition Alignment Tool) and Toshiba HDDs
Advanced Format HDDs achieve their best performance when the data configuration is aligned in a format compliant with the host file system. In PC HDDs, the installed OS determines the host file system.
Conventional OSes not designed for Advanced Format, such as Windows® XP, are not capable of creating partitions to optimize the performance of Advanced Format HDDs. While Toshiba Generation One Advanced Format HDDs can emulate writing data in increments of 512 bytes by writing such data in increments of 4KB, if the HDD is not appropriately partitioned, frequent performance of such an operation?called Read-modify-write (RMW)?may decrease system performance.
To solve this problem, Toshiba offers a partition alignment tool (PAT: the Paragon Partition Alignment Tool for Toshiba HDDs) which rewrites and optimizes partitions for Advanced Format HDDs.
PAT is the dedicated partition alignment tool for Toshiba Generation One Advanced Format HDDs. In general, PAT need only be executed once, but if the OS is changed or a partition is added, re-executing PAT may improve system performance.
