I might be wrong regarding the Advanced Format Utility. Like I said earlier, drives are not my area of expertise. I am asking people who do know more than me to get a proper answer to that particular question.
Regarding sector size vs OS: I’m by no means an authority on the issue, but I’ll try to explain to the best of my knowledge. It’s complicated. XP doesn’t normally handle 4k sector sizes very well. XP creates partitions that are misaligned with 4k sectors, so you end up with poor performance. However, the drive can be adjusted to compensate for this. I think that’s what the Advanced Format Utility is for. However, Vista and 7 have no such issues. They can handle both 512 byte sectors and 4k sectors just fine. The reason that the Quick Formatter tool sets the drive to 4k sectors for XP compatibility is that this is the only way to get XP to see partitions greater than 2TB. There isn’t a “default” sector size for drives for the different OSes. This particular tool sets up the drive in a particular way to work around a compatibility issue.
