The data storage industry is transitioning the physical format of hard disk drives from 512-byte sectors to 4,096-byte sectors – commonly called 4K or 4KB sectors. Is the Windows operating system ...

A lot has been written and discussed regarding Advanced Format. It's the wave of the future for hard drives, but there's still a lot of mystery surrounding it. Many people have brushed it aside since ...

The answer is "both". All 512e drives are 4K native, they're just in a compatibility mode for 512 byte sectors. AIDA64 will tell you. For example, here's my Toshiba P300 in 512e mode: You can see that ...

Emily Long is a freelance writer based in Salt Lake City. After graduating from Duke University, she spent several years reporting on the federal workforce for Government Executive, a publication of ...

If you’re installing a new hard drive, or need to wipe your drive clean for that “fresh” feeling, you’ll end up formatting your drive. Formatting will check the drive for errors, and prepare it for ...

Before we begin, it’s important to know that formatting a drive will erase everything on it, so you’ll want to make sure that you back up or save anything that you don’t want to lose. After you’ve ...

Formatting your hard drive is an important step in setting up your computer. It clears all the data off the disk so that you can start fresh. DiskPart is a powerful command-line tool that allows you ...

Most external hard drives come formatted with the FAT file system, which makes the drive compatible with multiple operating systems. As such, the drive is immediately usable out of the box. If you ...