Hotfix for Windows 7 for Advanced Format (4KB sector) discs

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

This just in: a hotfix is available for Windows 7 and Server 2008.

This addresses multiple problems with these operationg systems dealing with Advanced Format disks. These are also known as 4KB sector disks. WD led the way with these.

I had thought that Windows 7 handled them correctly. Turns out there are some problems. Read the hotfix here …

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982018

I’ll summarise of the issues -

  1. Error message when you click the Check for Updates button on Windows Update site

  2. Slow performance - when being asked to write only part of a 4KB sector, the disk is having to read-then-write to update the unchanged portion. This is basically a bug in the o/s not a fault in the disk.

  3. The rest of the issues are not as critical I think

Hope this info may help someone.

Regards

David

2

Advanced Format drives actually use 4,096-byte (4 KiB) sectors, as opposed to the traditional 512-byte sectors.

That’s why most OSes will align the first partition at 1 MiB, which aligns for both traditional and Advance Format drives.

3

Not sure what I was thinking with “4MB sectors”! Thanks for the heads up. Fixed now.

4

It’s the same reason I sometimes tell people my first PC computer had an 80GB drive–which would have been quite ae feat for 1992!  It’s because we’re all spoiled!

Now get off my lawn!  :wink:

5

It looks like Microsoft has finally caught up with Linux after two years.  Unfortunately, WD drives still seem to be lieing and claiming they have 512 byte physical sectors.  I keep hoping they will fix their firmware to comply with the ATA standard and report both the logical and physical sector size, maybe now they will with Microsoft getting on the bandwagon.