Modern hard drives are shipping with newer features, some of them more confusing than others. One such feature that’s causing a lot of head-scratching and confusion amongst the ranks is the new, so-called “advanced format” hard disks that are now shipping. Generally, these are newer SSDs as well as traditional “spinning rust” hard drives larger than 4TiB in capacity. What’s 4k all about and why do we need it? To understand this, we’re going to have to take a trip back in time and find out exactly how disks work, how an operating system talks to a disk in order to read/write from/to the disk, and see why the old way was broken and needed to be replaced with something newer and better.

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