Talk:Advanced Format

It should be noted that drives with 4KB logical sectors work on Windows XP (even x86-32) an all later versions of Windows if not used as boot drives. --MrBurns (talk) 01:58, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

I would respectfully ask for a cite on that, as the only reason I've ended up here is because of having trouble doing certain operations with a brand-new 3TB external HDD that's seemingly come formatted as an (XP compatible?) MBR/NTFS drive... Even Windows *7* can't write certain types of files to it (presumably those whose associated programs require sector-level access; disk backup images, VHDs...), and when I assumed this was because the partition size exceeded 2TB and so halved it, I could then neither make a new partition that occupied more than 0.5TB of the remainder, nor re-expand the original partition beyond 2TB again.

I suspect what's happened is that the manufacturer (Toshiba) pulled some trickery to format the thing with a bogus MBR, pre-engineered a primary NTFS partition within that which happens to take up "3TB", and are relying on Windows to believe what it reads from the NTFS partition info rather than what's listed in the MBR (which probably says 2TB, or maybe something completely invalid like 0 sectors...) ... and now that I've altered it to fit the specs, it's also tweaked the MBR, and all bets are off. ((I wonder what would have happened if I'd resized it to 2.5TB?)) ..... Hence, I'm considering converting it to GPT before I put any worthwhile data on there (right now I'm in a forced bit of mental downtime whilst moving the file-based backups I'd made to it temporarily onto whatever space I can find on my older, smaller discs).

It's likely that the drive itself is also running in 512e mode, and presenting its 4k native sectors as bunches of 8x 512 old style ones to prevent the OS shitting its pants. This would, of course, be compatible with XP 32-bit, at least up to the 2TB boundary, because as far as the OS is concerned, it's dealing with a normal, old style drive. But everything I've read so far suggests that both 4k native (or "4k logical") disks, and GPT based ones, simply don't work with XP, as it has no routines for dealing with this otherwise quite alien structure (I suppose you could probably co-opt the optical disc handling routines, but then you'd have to format your drives as UDF and probably deal with all kinds of additional issues surrounding maximum size, addressability, and write-on-demand). I guess we'll soon find out when I experimentally plug the thing into my older XP-based laptop and see what happens... In fact I think I'll do that both before and after the conversion (as it's reversible, after all)...

I mean, if it turns out I can reformat it as GPT, get a full 3TB partition, use the sector-based apps with it under Windows 7, AND connect it natively to WinXP instead of having to use it as a shared network drive (which would mean losing access via the old machine if the new one isn't present), I'd be a very happy camper. But it doesn't seem likely. 146.90.69.70 (talk) 00:40, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

A citation was asked - i found this useful information: "Certain external 3 TB disks from Seagate (FreeAgent GoFlex) and Western Digital (My Book Essential) can be used - thanks to a technical trick - on XP at full capacity. They report over their USB or FireWire interface not the usual 512-byte sectors, but 4K sectors. In this way, the 2 TB limitation of the MBR can be avoided. But this trick also has disadvantages: programs, which do low-level access on the disk - for example formatting tools - may not work on such disks. Also, as a boot disk they are not suitable."(translated) from ^[1] (website of German computer magazine c't). So these adapters seem to do a back-translation of 512e to 4k sectors (thus undoing the emulation of Advanced Format). MBR has a limitation of *number of sectors* (not size of disk) <= 2 ^ 32, and if the sectors are 4k the MBR limit is extended theoretically to 2^32 * 4k = 16 TB. Furthermore the drivers of the operating system must be able to work with >2TB disks (theoretically LBA48 has a much larger limit, but the drivers have to support it too). Apparently if this is all the case, it can work even on Windows XP. Above, it is described by the way for external drives, so for 4k native *internal* >2TB-drives (once they are available) it should also work. 78.43.73.113 (talk) 14:31, 27 September 2014 (UTC)

Somebody told me, you are able to build a hard disk greater than 2 TB only when using Advanced Format. But now I see WD Black 4 TB (WD4001FAEX) without Advanced Format. Could somebody explain this to me? --193.246.68.27 (talk) 13:41, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Somebody did not tell you the truth...

While larger sectors have several benefits (as described in the article) there is no technical reason in the design of harddisks why they could not continue to use 512 bytes per sector.

The 2 TB limit is not a limit imposed by the physical drive hardware, but by the 32 bit arithmetics used in the software in conjunction with 512 bytes / sector (2^32 * 512 = 2 TB). With 4096 bytes per sector you could reach up to 16 TB with 32-bit addressing, however, this is not really pushing the envelope. The solution to this problem is not 4 KB sectors, but using more than 32 bit for LBA addressing. This requires 48-bit or 64-bit arithmetics to be used in the software, and switching from MBR partitioning (which maxes out at 32 bit as well) to GPT partitioning.

The next limit will be when LBA-48 maxes out at 2^48 * 512 = 128 PB.

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 14:47, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

I think there's some misunderstandings here. The shift to 4k sectors is an entirely physical thing, in essence; it allows manufacturers to get a "free" boost in capacity and speed by reducing the amount, and particularly frequency of error correction information and head positioning markers to something that's more in tune with the density and reliability of discs being made in 2013, not 1983. They've already been doing it for some time now - even WD's lower capacity, lower performance drives (e.g. the 1TB "Green") shifted over about 18 months ago... the idea that their highest capacity, highest performance one (the 4TB "Black") wouldn't have, in 2013, is pure folly. All you're seeing is the exposed 512-byte Emulation layer (hands up anyone here who remembers logical overlays to allow use of high capacity HDDs with incompatible BIOSes, back in the 504MB limit days? Yep, similar idea.) which the drive presents to the operating system by default, and is the source of various alignment woes if you don't take pains to reformat it properly (the official software is able to pick up on particular "hints" in the reported capacity data to properly repartition/reformat with full alignment of the OS's 4kb clusters to the disk's physical 4k sectors through the emulated 0.5k ones).

It doesn't mean you've got a 4TB disc that's somehow secretly not Advanced Format, because you haven't. Manufacturers typically AREN'T shouting about their devices using it, because it's not worth the serious user confusion and FUD that would result; the people who need to know about it, know about it, and those that don't get to know are yer typical home user whose machinery and operating system tend not to be more than about 5 years out of date and so have quietly and "automatically" integrated the necessary upgrades and updates to ensure full cross compatibility, and to allow the transition to happen absolutely silently. My mother doesn't know nor care what a hard disk sector is, nor its size, and neither does she need to, despite owning a Vista laptop and having access to a Win7 one, and both 2 and 3TB external discs... all that matters is that in those cases, the things work... The "advanced format" thing would be an utter irrelevance in 99.9% of situations, so they don't mention it. And the disc just goes on pretending to have 512-byte sectors.

Matthias does have it correct, though - if you use GPT formatting, it doesn't matter what your logical or physical sector size is... you can address up to 2^64 of them (approx. 18 quadrillion... quintillion? In any case, enough for (Sector Size) x 16 Exabytes of data, where an Exabyte is one binary million terabytes)... or in other words 8192 to 65536 exabytes with 512 and 4096 byte sectors... assuming something's done about the LBA issues (but I have a feeling that by this point we're achieving atomic densities, so there are far more pressing issues to overcome before the 131072 Terabyte LBA-48 limit (or indeed, a 1048576 terabyte one, with 4k sectors, seeing as each "logical block" that LBA addresses is actually one sector?) becomes a serious problem). As I said, AF has nowt to do with the actual filesystem put on top, it's merely a physical thing.

tl;dr, you've been lied to twice. The WD drive DOES have AF. And you don't need it to make a disk bigger than 2TB, it just makes it easier to engineer something of such high capacity, and allows it to have higher transfer speeds (both by a factor of about 10%). The more critical problems are the MBR-type filesystems (and indeed, the MBR used by older versions of Windows that flat out assume 512 byte sectors with no way of indicating anything different) and various other matters of OS and FS compatibility or inbuilt limits. The fact that the MBR limit, with 512b sectors, just happens to be 2TB itself only helps to confuse matters. 146.90.69.70 (talk) 01:21, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

OK, I'm going to be bold and just flat out delete that "or 520" addendum from where it currently appears in the article, unless someone can come along and both explain just what the sweet jesus it's referring to, and make a good case for its retention.

I've been in this game more than 20 years now, seeing operating systems, filesystems, disk formats and a great many individual drives and disks come and go, and I've never heard of a 520-byte disk sector. 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 2336, 2352 and 4096, sure, but not 520. And, even if it exists (which I can't discount outright, even though it's be both weird and very rare), what is its relevance to Advanced Format? It's merely 8 bytes longer than 512 after all, it's not going to be some massively revolutionary size-freeing-up alternative to 4k sectors. Plus it would simply not work with the vast majority of higher-level filesystems out there.

C'mon, whoever put that in. Defend yourself and your kooky number. 146.90.69.70 (talk) 02:05, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Right. Now removed, and some other tweaks done. Out of interest I rolled back through the edit history to see if it was original to the page or added by someone at some point. It looks to have been introduced by a (named) editor sometime back in 2010 who added a suspiciously huge amount of text and images all at once, plus a single link... a link which goes to some industry body webpage with a presentation that includes some very familiar looking images for anyone who's looked down the article page (what's the copyright status on those - is Wikipedia allowed to reproduce them?). Said page, however, doesn't currently make any reference to 520-byte sectors. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if they'd done a huge cut and paste job from a previous version of said page/presentation that had a careless typo in it, since corrected, such that the "old" sector size was reported as 520 bytes throughout, and our editor in question, being smart but maybe not best informed, spotted the discrepancy... not knowing which was correct, they made it an either-or.

That said, if someone can show us some systems, widespread enough to be of note in this situation, that use that slightly bigger number, I'd genuinely be very interested to see it. 146.90.69.70 (talk) 02:36, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

IIRC, 520 bytes / sector were used by some Hewlett Packard machines. I should have some documents about them in my archive. In either case, 520 bytes / sector, as odd as they may seem to normal IBM-compatible PC users today, are no non-sense, therefore I put them back in for now. Matthiaspaul (talk) 08:50, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

A quick web search reveals that drives with sector sizes other than 512 bytes were (and still are) available in the market. Disk vendors and distributors I found having offered them include IBM, Seagate, Hitachi, EMC, NetApp, Dell, with interfaces such as SCSI, SAS, Fibre Channel, and SATA. Common hard disk sector sizes include byte payloads of 256, 512, 514, 516, 518, 520, 522, 524, 528, 1024 and now 4096 bytes per sector, with 512, 1024 and 4096 bytes per sector the most common ones. Here are the specs of some Hitachi harddisks supporting various sector sizes: --Matthiaspaul (talk) 21:28, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Please add the reference on a page, where that info is on topic. It's certainly interesting, but here it's only confusing. I've removed two still existing unsourced 520 muddying the water. The 1956 detail could also go, if nobody finds a good reference for ancient cases of 512. –Be..anyone (talk) 21:52, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

Done, please check it out. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 22:05, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

Quotes (1): Woohoo! Yet another API. (2) Anal-retentive applications use direct or sync I/O. (3, on a mockup popup window) Disk write returned -EATFLAMINGDEATH. BrokenOffice failed saving your document due to volume "MY_USB_DRIVE" catching fire. Please select a different place for your document. [X Roger]

That's unfinished (?) marketing for additional checksum info for each 512 bytes sector. All (physical+rotating, not solid state) disks back to the times of floppy disks and earlier always had something in the direction of checksum/start/end/number markers between sectors, minimally a gap. It's not a 520 or 528 bytes sector with 520 or 528 bytes data. The 8 or 16 extra bytes are consumed by whatever "enterprise" data integrity feature Oracle tried to sell. It's off topic for the 4Kn/512e article, maybe you find a place for this reference in articles related to HBA, SATA, Parallel_SCSI, or just Oracle. This unfinished (?) PDF was written in a time before Advanced Format, it mentions 4096-bytes sectors are coming. –Be..anyone (talk) 06:14, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

Well, it's true that Oracle pushed DIF and DIX, but they are a reality. There are HDDs with 520- and 528-byte sectors, such as HGST Ultrastar ("Ultrastar 7K4000 dual port SAS is available in traditional 512, 520 and 528 byte sector size."), and Linux kernel supports DIF/DIX. The 520 or 528 actually is the size of a sector, in bytes, as that's how large is the smallest allocatable unit on such HDDs; those additional 8 or 16 bytes are usable space, as their purpose is to allow the RAID controller or application to store additional checksums. With all that in mind, it's actually good for the article not to be restricted to 512 as the sector size found in mainstream HDDs. Hope you agree. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 06:59, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

It is off topic here. There are no drivers, filesystems, or operating systems supporting sector size 520 as data in the same way as 512 bytes are data. There is no plausible reason to create such drivers, filesystems, or operating systems, why would anybody pay $$$ for a data integrity feature, and then disable it to get eight bytes more per sector? Strange formatting tricks for floppy disks as DRM existed 25 years ago, that won't justify to add obscure info on completely unrelated pages like this, e.g., "while 512 bytes were often used other sizes could be also achieved". Which reader interested in 4Kn/512e expects to find a complete history of unusual things here? Should I post the source code demonstrating a working sector size 32 bytes DOS RAM disk driver below or above 520? –Be..anyone (talk) 10:05, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

As you can see in provided references, 520- and 528-byte sectors are there, and I still find that we have no reasons to limit the article to mainstream technology. You've also asked which reader would be interested in such stuff, and I have an answer: I would. Back at the time when I was only reading the articles, I always wanted to see more than a Joe Average would expect to see. Thus, not all readers are Joe Averages, and quite frankly, I'd bet that Joe Averages don't even care about the Advanced Format.

When I wrote that additional 8 or 16 bytes are usable space, it didn't mean or write that the additional space is accessible to end users. Instead, it's accessible to the RAID controller or application (as I also wrote above). With your example of a DOS RAM disk driver, what should a RAM disk have in common with HDDs in general (except that an operating system sees it as a HDD, but that's irrelevant in this context), and why would sector sizes emulated in a RAM disk driver have anything to do with sector sizes in HDDs? Sorry, but as a counterargument that really makes no sense. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 10:49, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

3rd opinion invited. –Be..anyone (talk) 15:03, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

A Third Opinion has been requested on 512 (or 520) byte. However—There are too many people already involved. So the request has been declined. Fairly strictly, only two Wikipedian's can be involved, and there are already four contributors here.

Perhaps Dispute resolutions would be a viable next option, if needed.

—Lightgodsy^(TALK_CONT) 17:14, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

I can't see a dispute here, just a discussion between editors who happen to have a different view. No harm done, therefore no need to escalate non-issues like this. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 00:41, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

Like Dsimic, I find the alternative sector sizes interesting enough to be mentioned in an article dealing with the transition of one widespread sector size to another. It's good for the quality of an article to provide rich context information. In the context of the transition to 4K sectors, I think, it's useful to remind people (developers) that other sector sizes exist as well. It helps in the design of more compatible or flexible systems.

However, we shouldn't start to discuss these alternative sector sizes in better details in this article (unless they would be specifically dealt with in the AF standard). Any further information about them (and I am certainly one of those who would be interested to learn more about them) should be put into articles dealing with various hard disk sector sizes in general (perhaps one of those articles on internal recording formats).

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 00:41, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

OK, the "named user" I alluded to above is actually Doug...

Now, I could be getting the wrong end of the stick, maybe he was actually the graphic designer for the IDEMA presentation, and maybe it's a public domain thing that he and we are free to share... particularly as some similar looking images that AREN'T part of it appear here...

But still, there are pictures in the article that are clearly just crops from a presentation on their site concerning AF (they have a downloadable PDF which features identical diagrams in better (vector!) resolution than what wiki does), and in whose copyright fields Doug has listed the ownership info as "own work".

The PDF's listed author is one "Liz Ohlhausen". I don't think "own work" applies to cutting something out and sticking it in an electronic scrapbook.

Unless those diagrams are considered public domain, are actually Doug's to give away, or "fair use" in some other area, we might have to -actually- roll our own brightly coloured, seemingly MS Painted (or maybe Powerpointed?) depictions of how 512-byte sectors expand to 4kbyte and the like...

(It might also be the case that a good amount of the article copy is also lifted from IDEMA textual sources, but I haven't gone so far as to check/verify this. Perhaps he's just rather knowledgeable and a prolific typer.) 146.90.69.70 (talk) 02:49, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Did you send Liz a link to this discussion? If Doug actually made the logo for her, this would be still an issue of it's work-for-hire or if he's employed/member of the association behind said article's main content. It seems like either conflict-of-interest or plagiarism is likely. You could still make the fair use argument as it's not exactly like Wikipedia is selling hard drives or copying the presentation. At least I hope we didn't just copy their white sheets! XD 2601:1:9500:6D5:8C25:E9D9:1588:7BC6 (talk) 09:16, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

It would be good to have a list of typical 512e and native 4K drives

ie

512e

WD EARS Later Seagate 2 and 3TB drives

Native 4K

not many

soem Toshiba 1.8" drives in in devices — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.147.129.196 (talk) 14:34, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

• AFAIK, there are no 4K Native drives released yet. Please correct me if I'm wrong there. -- Dsimic (talk) 16:54, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

Due to technical and marketing reasons, it's likely that the first non-512B-sector drives will be in something alongs the lines of NAS or DVR boxes and corporate-aimed servers. With Linux, the kernel isn't the limitation anymore, so mainly it's a matter of Grub or Lilo supporting it. http://www.acronis.com/support/documentation/ABR11.5/index.html#21004.html and a (tech support) forum discussion I read seems to imply that they're already being used in external USB drives. Performance advantage of '4Kn' drives is going to be questionable at best since partitioning tools now try to use multiples of 8 sectors or even a megabyte (for SSD's), and if ever they go to 100TB+ drives, we'll have the same issue with larger sector sizes. It's quite possible that a standard will be that all drives include the logic to convert to 512e unless the OS specifically askes it not to or a boot CD utility disc from the manufacturer will be able to set it to native/emulated. 2601:1:9500:6D5:8C25:E9D9:1588:7BC6 (talk) 09:48, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Some sources say that the April 2014 end-of-life for Windows XP (which doesn't support them) is going to be the mark for AF disks to become commercially available. Any references, please, for the optional/configurable 512e emulation you're describing? I'm also wondering what's going to happen with the supply of 512-byte (or 512e) HDDs as spare parts for older computers not supporting 4Kn for any reason? — Dsimic (talk) 21:12, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Are you sure about the USB 4Kn thing? I've read before about many >3TB USB external drives presenting 4k sectors to the host and I even have one myself (haven't cracked it open though in case I need the warranty) but AFAIK most of there aren't really 4Kn. If you open up the external drive and connect the drive directly via SATA, you actually find it's a 512e drive. The USB controller is simply taking the 512e SATA and presenting the drive as a 4k sector drive to the USB host (which should be aligned, unless the manufacturer really screwed up). While some would still call this a 4Kn drive I find it a little confusing and I don't think these are ever sold as 4Kn drives per se.

Personally I would be surprised if 4Kn drives are really used in external drives. Most of these, or at least the mass market cheap ones are simply bog standard 3.5" drives put in a casing with a SATA to USB controller and getting power from a 12V external power supply. I think even the more expensive ones are the same, simply with better casing, fancier controllers with more options such as ethernet, firewire or eSATA (well you don't really need much for this but probaly for market differentation reasons most don't present this). Producing special drives, even if all you need is special firmware or worst case a different logic board (but if you're going to that might as well make them USB native) defeats the advantage to the manufacturer of simply being able to use any drive for it.

Things are a little different in the portable drive field (i.e. 2.5" or smaller). Since manufacturers are aiming for small size, there is a minor advantage to only having one logic board. There's also the fact some portables use 12.5mm thick hard drives which I expect are probably most commonly used in portable hard drives anyway since they are too thick for most laptops . (I think even 9.5mm is getting less popular.) 15mm enterprise drives are of course a different kettle of fish. So there do seem to be a number of native USB portable hard disks. For these disks, if they present 4K to the host then I guess you can say they are 4Kn unless the manufacturer is doing something really weird with an internal SATA to USB. But since these haven't topped 2TB I don't know if it's an issue yet anyway.

Nil Einne (talk) 14:26, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

This page contains much general information that is a good introduction. But there are still issues that are left pretty vague, and things that are confusingly mixed. For example the 3 categories in the top right box seem to concern different things.

It would be nice to identify the various interfaces that can exist in a system and explain what happens at each interface. Typically, I use 3TB disks, which I access through external enclosures connected by USB, with a PC under an OS (Linux in my case). So I have at least two interfaces: drive-enclosure, and enclosure-PC, and possibly more inside the PC between hardware and OS (I do not know).

How do(es) the standard(s) operate at each interface. Typically, for the same HDD inside, some enclosures are seen by the system as one 2.7MiB drive with 512B sectors, while some others see two drives of 2MiB and 0.7MiB, with 512B sectors. I cannot explain that from what I read in the current wikipedia page. What is the role played by external enclosure in the Advanced format scheme.

I also wonder why some manufacturers claim they can handle 4TB, or 6TB, or 8TB, which I see as limitations. Why not handle more? What is the nature of the problem.

Wikipedia readers are not all specialists. Thanks. Teetooan (talk) 13:31, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

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In this article's presentation, I mistakenly got the impression that one could buy either a 512e or a 4Kn. However, after some digging, I discovered that at least one manufacturer (Seagate) allows the end user to change a drive from 512 Emulation mode to Native 4k mode. [Seagate's SeaChest]

With all three of the major Operating Systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux) being able to support 4Kn, I'd been surprised that the industry appears stuck halfway through transition, at 512e mode, especially in that sector misalignment presents itself as a fairly performance lagging issue.

I am therefore requesting, after Categories: 512e and 4Kn paragraphs some information indicating the possibility of changing from 512e to 4Kn. However, I have only identified one manufacturer providing this capability, and do not know the status of others.(76.112.155.131 (talk) 10:07, 26 December 2019 (UTC))