Advanced Format 4K Hard Drives

Title: Align Partition in Advanced Format 4K Hard Drives

Keywords: advanced format 4K hard drives, align partition, MiniTool Partition Wizard

Description: When you want to align partition in advanced format 4K hard drives, turning to the free partition magic – MiniTool Partition Wizard will be a wise choice.

Something related to advanced format 4K hard drives will be introduced for users here. It is well known that the operation system saves data in the form of sectors. And the sector size in traditional hard drive is 512B. However, the sectors don’t stand closely to each other and things (like “Gap”, “Sync” and Address Mark) exist between 2 sectors. Then there will be a large number of gaps in a large-capacity hard disk. Therefore, much hard disk space will be wasted. To fix this kind of problem, expanding the original 512B sector size to 4096B became an urgent. Finally, the 4K hard drive appears. It decreases the number of gaps between sectors and optimizes the hard drive space utilization.

However, for compatibility, the 4K sector has been divided into 8 pieces of 512 byte sectors. Each read and write would be done in every eight 512 byte sectors. If we have copied partitions or move/resize partition, the 8 512 sectors may be unaligned with the physical 4k sector, which means reading data in the eight 512 byte sectors will access 2 physical sector:

For fast data read speed, it is very necessary to make 4k alignment.

But what is the best solution to aligning partitions? Here, I strongly recommend adopting the third party partition manager – MiniTool Partition Wizard – to do the job. It is widely used by many computer users. With the help of this software, partition alignment for Windows can be accomplished in two steps.

Please download this freeware to your computer and then install it to the Windows
operating system (take Win 7 for an example).

Next, launch the program to enter its main interface.

1. Choose the specified hard disk, and click “Align All Partitions“ in the left panel to get into next interface.

2. Click “Apply“ button from the left top corner to confirm all changes.

With the help of MiniTool Partition Wizard, aligning 4K hard disk partition has been successfully fulfilled in Windows 7. Now, I believe that you have grasped a better understanding of 4K hard drive and partition alignment.

Tips: If you are working with Windows Server os, then you could try to use MiniTool Partition Wizard Server, the latest partition magic server to complete your task.