Hard Disk Monitoring

HDSentinal Pro 4.40, and also 4.30, agree that my brand new Toshiba 1 TB USB3 connected HDD uses Advanced Disk Format.
I attach your Disk Report.

fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo says it does NOT use Advanced Disk Format.

This article tells me that "The hotfix from Microsoft KB982018 may be required."
http://www.symantec.com/business/suppor ... TECH194586
Do you think I need to install that update ?

According to the above article I DO NOT have Advanced Format on my Toshiba Drive partition J:\,
it seems to be the same as my old Samsung Drive partition D:\ This is baffling
https://storage.toshiba.eu/cms/en/hdd/p ... ductid=409
Bytes/sector (Host) 512
Bytes/sector (Disk) 4096 kByte - ?? really, 4 Megabytes per sector ??

I am concerned about any damage I may have done with Minitool Partition Wizard when I shrunk the 1 TB partition to 1 GB and created a 100 GB partition on the other side of 900 GB of unallocated space.
Before I did ANY modifications I used Macrium Reflect to create a partition Image backup of the original 1 TB partition so that I could restore normality after experimenting with Partition managers.
I intend asking Macrium if proper Advanced Disk Format will be restored,
but wish to know first of all if I really have got Advanced Disk format,
and if I should be aware of any other problems when using Partition tools and defragmentation tools
- I am aware that some defragmenters cannot deal with larger that 2 TB disks that use Advanced Format
and suspect that even this 1 TB could suffer grief if it is Advanced Format.

This is what I bought
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/search-ke ... teria.html
I really wish that I had studied the technical data before I went for the cheapest option

Regards
Alan

I can confirm that if the actual partition on the hard disk is not aligned properly, it does not create any damage to the hard disk (or the files) but then you may have poor read/write performance. So yes: if you have and Advanced Format drive (drive with 4096 bytes in each physical sectors) the best is to have one (or more) partition(s) on that which would be aligned correctly: so the logical drive allocation units of the partition should match with the physical sector size of the hard disk.

To verify very quickly and easily if the logical drive (partition) is aligned correctly, I'd recommend to use Hard Disk Sentinel: just select the appropriate logical drive on the bottom left area (eg. D: or J:) and notice the displayed "Alignment" field as displayed on the screenshot:



This value shows how the partition is located on the actual physical hard disk. If this value can be divided (aliquout) by the physical sector size of the hard disk size, then the logical drive is aligned correctly.
For example on the image, you can see that Alignment is 1 MB (which means the partition starts at 1 MB boundary) which is correctly aligned for 4 Kbytes physical sectors on that hard disk.
For other, un-aligned drives you may see 512 bytes or other values (1 Kbytes or 2 Kbytes) in the Alignment field, which is lower than the physical sector size and confirms that the partition would be not aligned properly.

So I'd recommend to check that value - as fsutil usually shows 512 bytes per sector regardless of the drive type. It only means that (for direct reading/writing) the NTFS volume can be accessed in sectors with 512 bytes, but for file operations it uses of course the "Cluster size" for reading/writing. Just the position of those clusters should match with the physical sectors of the hard disk for optimal performance.

Many thanks

My Toshiba drive commences with
F:\ = 1000 MB and alignment is reported as 1 MB, then
829.56 GB Unallocated, then
J:\ = 100 GB and alignment is reported as 2 MB, then
K:\ = 999 MB and alignment is reported as 4 MB

It looks golden to me.

Questions :-
1.
Do I need "The hotfix from Microsoft KB982018" in my Windows 7 Ultimate + SP1,
or is that only relevant to Drives that are driven direct by SATA - does USB3 insulate me from that requirement ?

2.
May I assume that all Disk Partition Backup/Restore software works on 4 kByte file clusters and is totally unaffected by Advanced Format,
or do I need to ask specific questions of each supplier ?
Before I partitioned I used two different products to hopefully ensure that I could restore to as-new state.

2.
This Drive is less than 2 TB so I do not need Advanced format, so what is the benefit ?
Is it that each 4 kBytes needs only one inter-sector gap and sector identity compared to the 8 needed by non-advanced,
and therefore a few more 4 kByte chunks can be held on each track ?
(in Days of DOS I was familiar with controlling Western Digital FDDC to format interleaved quantities of sectors on Floppy Discs - I never risked formatting an HDD)

Regards
Alan

> It looks golden to me.

Yes, I can confirm this is excellent, so there are no problems with alignment.

> Do I need "The hotfix from Microsoft KB982018" in my Windows 7 Ultimate + SP1,
> or is that only relevant to Drives that are driven direct by SATA - does USB3 insulate me from that requirement ?

If you do not experience any of the issues mentioned on the official page of that hotfix (for example no bad performance when writing to the device) I'd recommend to not install it. Generally yes, the hotfix replaces many driver files as well - which are designed for the SATA connection, the USB line works completely different.


> May I assume that all Disk Partition Backup/Restore software works on 4 kByte file clusters and is totally unaffected by Advanced Format,
> or do I need to ask specific questions of each supplier ?

I can't really say for sure. However, this is completely independent from the actual hard disk, but related to the defined allocation unit for the partition(s) created and archived/restored. As you could see in both Hard Disk Sentinel and fsutil, the allocation size (cluster size) of the defined partition is 4 kbytes.
This is Windows default value for NTFS partitions and usually this is not changed. Problem would be if smaller cluster size would be selected - but this would be very rare and impractical.


> This Drive is less than 2 TB so I do not need Advanced format, so what is the benefit ?

With one word: nothing.
The AF would be required only to address large capacity drives (over 2 TB). Smaller drives usually emulate 512 bytes mode (even if 4 kbytes sector size used) - but may cause worse performance without alignment. So if I'm strict, AF on drives smaller than 2 TB has no benefits - but may cause compatibility issues.

> Is it that each 4 kBytes needs only one inter-sector gap and sector identity compared to the 8 needed by non-advanced,
> and therefore a few more 4 kByte chunks can be held on each track ?

Yes, while this is true (and means that the areal density can improve) it also means that less space may be used for error detection / correction (as now a physical sector of 4kbytes is "protected" instead of the previously used error correction for 8 x 512 bytes).
I mean that on standard drives, when a sector goes bad, you'd lose 512 bytes data. On AF drives, if a sector goes bad, you lose 4096 bytes of data (even if the hard disk emulates 512 bytes sector size, as internally it need to read/write the whole 4 kbyte sector).

> (in Days of DOS I was familiar with controlling Western Digital FDDC to format interleaved quantities of sectors on
> Floppy Discs - I never risked formatting an HDD)

You may remember, there were methods to set interleave and format on HDDs also (eg. MFM HDDs) with special format tools to improve performance Now this is not required as the hard disk performs this automatically.