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    advanced format hard drive

    Discussion in 'VAIO / Sony' started by collinm, Aug 3, 2011.

  1. collinm

    collinm Newbie

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    hi

    how to know if my sony vaio vgn-c240e support advanced format hard drive?

    thanks
     
  2. James D

    James D Notebook Prophet

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    What a heck is advanced format???

    I don't have such model so I suggest you to search owner's lounge thread if it exists.
     
  3. jpride

    jpride Notebook Evangelist

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    Advanced format means 4k sectors instead of 512b.

    collin if you are running win7 sp1 with up-to-date patches you can run this at a command prompt (c: is whatever letter the drive in question is of course):
    fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo c:

    Bytes per physical sector will give you the answer.
    Otherwise, look up your drive. We don't know what drive you have. Most drives out in laptops right now are not advanced format of course.

    Edit: I was reading your question as asking whether the system comes with an AF drive, but re-reading I think you asking if you can add one. You can as long as you have SATA (some even have PATA interfaces) and are running an operating system that supports and is preferably optimized for it. You can if you have Win 7 SP1 with patches or Vista or several others. The drive manufacturer you are considering (Western Digital?) will have the info you need.
     
  4. Profy_X

    Profy_X Notebook Consultant

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    I advice you to use Active kill disk and partition manager home edition which is free :p
     
  5. jpride

    jpride Notebook Evangelist

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    ??? How is that going to change anything?
     
  6. Profy_X

    Profy_X Notebook Consultant

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    It will erase all data from the HDD writing it with 0's so the HDD will be reseted to factory default so this is a good ideea because you could get rid of all things from the history of your notebook and after you can just make partition with a partition driver the best way is to just download Hiren's Boot CD it has all inside and burn it to CD and boot ;)
     
  7. anytimer

    anytimer Notebook Virtuoso

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    I thought he was talking about AHCI.
     
  8. jpride

    jpride Notebook Evangelist

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    But this has nothing to do with the question. They didn't ask anything about destroying data or partitioning. They asked about whether their laptop would support a piece of hardware. Like I said before, an advanced format hard drive is one that has physical sectors that are 4K instead of 512 byte.That software or any other software isn't going to change physical sector size.