Dell Latitude E5420: Appendix B 512e / 4KBe HDD Re-image Guidelines

Dell Latitude Ultrabook, E-Family & Mobile Precision Reimage “How-To” Guide

Appendix B

512e / 4KBe HDD Re-image Guidelines

1 What is Advanced Format HDD?

HDD industry is moving towards supporting higher drives capacity, to address the current limitations

with the 512-byte sector HDDs, the industry is moving towards the Advanced Format with 4KB sector

HDDs.

The transition to 4KB sector HDDs will allow storage devices to more easily adopt larger capacities in

both the notebook and desktop space.

While hard drives will transition to 4KB sectors and to maintain backwards compatibility, current

Advanced Format 4KB HDDs, also known as 512e HDDs, will emulate 512-byte SATA

communications to hosts and will operate at 4KB.

2 How does an Advanced Format HDD impact OS Images?

Even though a 512e drive is designed to be backward compatible, most of current Operating Systems

are not aware of the Advanced Format technology. Depending on the Operating System and its

service pack, some extra steps may be required to optimize the performance of the Advanced Format

(512e) HDDs and to maintain full Operating System and Application functionality.

These extra steps could require using alignment tools to fix any sector misalignment as a result of

deploying a non-Advanced Format aware image on an Advanced Format HDD which may otherwise

cause performance issues.