Back in the time of the first hard drives, back when wild mainframes still roamed the world, a stan- dard sector size materialized into being. That size was 512 bytes. In a sector editor, that single sector looked like Figure 1. The 512-byte sector remained relatively unchanged until just a couple years ago, when some drives hit the marketplace with a new sector size of 4,096 bytes. These drives are affectionately referred to as 4K sector drives or simply 4K drives. The industry has chosen the term for this new media as advanced format. Here's how these new drives are poised to fundamentally change the storage industry. Why the Change? There are a couple reasons for this increase in sector size. A minor reason would be because of drive size.
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