Advanced Format Drives

Download the Hitachi Align Tool

Please answer the following questions to determine whether you need to download and use the Hitachi Align Tool.

Note: Any use of Windows XP and an Advanced Format drive requires use of the align tool.

Advanced Format describes a new standard in the hard drive industry that changes the way information is stored and organized on a the disk

Advanced Format drives incorporate several changes to optimize the actual data structure on the hard drive, including increasing the physical sector size from 512 bytes to a more efficient 4096 byte (4K) sector size. In order to ease the transition, current Advanced Format drives will continue to provide 512-byte emulation (512e) at the drive interface to provide backwards compatibility with legacy applications

Hitachi Align Tool

Most modern operating systems have been designed to work efficiently with Advanced Format drives. For optimum performance, it is important to ensure that the drive is partitioned correctly and that data is written in 4K blocks by both the operating system, and the application. Modern operating systems handle this automatically. When using Advanced Format drives in legacy environments, special tools may be required to optimize read/write performance and keep the data sectors aligned. Hitachi provides an alignment tool for this purpose. Answer a few simple questions above to determine if you will need to download and use the Hitachi Align Tool to obtain performance from your Advanced Format Hitachi hard drives.

For more information on Advanced Format Drives, consult the Hitachi Advanced Format Technology Brief