Appendix B - 512E / 4Kbe Hdd Re-Image Guidelines - Dell A03 How-To Manual

Dell Latitude E-Family & Mobile Precision Reimage "How-To" Guide
1 What is Advanced Format HDD?
HDD industry is moving towards supporting higher drives capacity, to address the current limitations with the 512-
byte sector HDDs, the industry is moving towards the Advanced Format with 4KB sector HDDs.
The transition to 4KB sector HDDs will allow storage devices to more easily adopt larger capacities in both the
notebook and desktop space.
While hard drives will transition to 4KB sectors and to maintain backwards compatibility, current Advanced
Format 4KB HDDs, also known as 512e HDDs, will emulate 512-byte SATA communications to hosts and will
operate at 4KB.
2 How does an Advanced Format HDD impact OS Images?
Even though a 512e drive is designed to be backward compatible, most of current Operating Systems are not aware
of the Advanced Format technology. Depending on the Operating System and its service pack, some extra steps
may be required to optimize the performance of the Advanced Format (512e) HDDs and to maintain full Operating
System and Application functionality.
These extra steps could require using alignment tools to fix any sector misalignment as a result of deploying a non-
Advanced Format aware image on an Advanced Format HDD which may otherwise cause performance issues.
Appendix B
512e / 4KBe HDD Re-image Guidelines