I have been using new Advanced Format drives and find them to be fast and reliable except for one thing which does not seem to get mentioned: In a Win7-64 machine, when copying to another non-AF disk, the speed is relatively slow.
Between partitions of the same AF disk the speed I see is almost what is specified at over 100 Megs/S.
Another older drive does around 70 Megs/S in the same situation but copying from the AF disk to the non-AF disk is only around 20 Megs/S.
Via a Gigabit net work, the speed is 70Megs/S regardless of disk type at either end but in the same machine, it is slow.
Is this to be expected? No jumpers or software for the AF are installed.
