Formatting 4k Drives (alignment?)

H

havokator

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 12, 2003
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Do I need to do anything special to format a 4k sector hard drive properly?

If I just use Disk Management in Windows 7 and do a simple format will that align the partition correctly for a 4k drive? I have the latest Intel RST (iaStor) drivers installed for my motherboard (P8P67 Pro).

So do I need to get a special program or does Windows 7 disk management do the job?

Also, what if the drives are in a RAID array using the motherboard's onboard controller? Do you have to do anything different when you format the whole RAID array?
 
For formatting AF hard drives under Vista and later, no. You don't need a special aligning utility (different story for XP/2003).
 
havokator said:
Do I need to do anything special to format a 4k sector hard drive properly?

If I just use Disk Management in Windows 7 and do a simple format will that align the partition correctly for a 4k drive? I have the latest Intel RST (iaStor) drivers installed for my motherboard (P8P67 Pro).

So do I need to get a special program or does Windows 7 disk management do the job?

Also, what if the drives are in a RAID array using the motherboard's onboard controller? Do you have to do anything different when you format the whole RAID array?
Click to expand...

windows 7 will align. if you want to be a billion percent sure, get a gparted cd, boot up, create the partition table, create the partition you want for windows, tell it to align to megabyte, do it, check the drive info, see if it starts on 2048. then you're set.
 
Formatting is not the issue, creating the partition aligned is. So, if you create the partition with 7, it's good.
 
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