It has been quite some time since IT Professionals have had to concern themselves with the configuration of the hard drives that were included in their desktops, laptops, and workstations.  Either the operating system or deployment tools did the dirty work of configuring the drive for you.  Well, technology never sits still, including hard drive technology.  Advanced Format (AF) Hard Drives are the latest change which will move the aging 512 byte disk technology into the future.  Hard Drive manufacturers agreed to begin shipping Advanced Format drives in January of 2011 and now PC manufacturers are switching over as a result.  Dell has been shipping AF drives on a select number of systems, but will begin transitioning the new Latitude laptops to AF drives this month.

Advanced Format drives use a 4096 byte (4K) physical sector, but emulate a 512 byte logical sector for compatibility with current operating systems.  The combination of the 4K physical sector and emulated 512 byte logical sector is called “Advanced Format” by the IDEMA.  The goal is to transition to drives that use 4K for physical and logical sectors but most operating systems don’t support native 4K drives at this time.

This leap forward in technology does bring some challenges that IT Professionals need to prepare for.

1. Advanced Format drives are difficult to identify.  Unless Hard Drive manufacturers begin placing the Advanced Format logo on drives, you will have to reference the drive’s part number to know the difference when looking at a drive.  From within an operating system like Windows, you will need a patch for Windows 7, that was updated last week, which included a tool so that you can identify Advanced Format (AF) from 512 Byte (512B) drives by their physical sector size.  If you are properly prepared for Advanced Format drives then identification is less important.

2. Partition Alignment matters.  With previous (512B) drives the physical and logical sector size was always 512 bytes.  Now with the physical sector being 4K and the emulated logical sector still being 512 bytes, you encounter performance issues if the start of the logical partitions don’t line up with the boundaries of the physical sectors.  Proper alignment will be dependent on the deployment methodology and tools that you use.

3. Operating System awareness.  Even though Microsoft Vista SP1 and newer operating systems are Advanced Format “aware” there are patches required for Vista and Windows 7 to address performance issues within the operating system that are not addressed with proper alignment.  XP is not Advanced Format “aware”.

There isn’t an easy button to fix all of these challenges, but there is plenty of information to help you build your custom solution.  The first place to start is the Dell TechCenter webpage on deploying Dell systems with Advanced format drives.  It has links to all of the current Dell documentation and tools along with links to required Microsoft patches and background information from the IDEMA.  It is being updated on a regular basis so check back often for updates. 

If you are unsure about what to tackle first, use these steps to prioritize your preparation for Advanced Format drives.

1. Partition alignment – Identify and implement the changes required for your deployment methodology to properly align partitions in your process.  This may include changing commands to your disk clone software, updating WinPE, etc.

2.Operating System – Identify and implement the updates required for the operating systems you deploy to ensure that they are compliant.

3. Verify – Use the scripts or tools available on Dell TechCenter to verify that your processes are now ready to support Advanced Format drives.    If you need an Advanced Format drive to test, contact your Dell account team and ask for Customer Kit 342-3146.

If you have questions stop by the Dell TechCenter chat on Tuesday May 3rd, 2011 at 3PM Central time to discuss Advanced Format drives with the AF team at Dell and other IT professionals.

You can also follow the conversation on Twitter with the #AFHDD hashtag.