What is Advanced Format?
Advanced Format, a generic term, involves those sector formats employed for data storage on hard drives with more than 512-520 bytes per sector. Many consider Advanced Format a milestone technology in the evolutionary course of hard drive storage.
4K Advanced Format
With the desperate need for delivering higher capacity points and improving Error Correction Capability, innovative and sensitive hard drive manufacturers recognized it had become urgent for them to survive competition by developing large sector sizes. During 2000 to 2009, storage media capacities increased lukewarmly by 44% every year on average. This situation, however, fell far behind what is really needed by users and drastic innovation is required in magnetic recording system technology. Hard drive manufactures, instead, lift the data surface area efficiency by 5% to 13% and increase the Error Correction Capability by altering the length of data field and using 4096-byte sectors (4K) Advanced Format.