Low-Level Formatting back to 512 byte Sectors?

[sir_laser]

I know that HDD manufacturers are going to be producing drives with 4KB sectors exclusively beginning in 2011.

Is it possible to LLF one of these new drives which use the 4KB sectors to use the legacy 512 byte sectors?

Thanks!

 

[Emulex]

no they emulate 512 byte sectors - like SSD

everyone aligns partitions nowadays

 

[taltamir]

low level format has not been possible on ANY drive produced in the past 15+ years. their miniturization level is such that they cannot perform it themselves, special hardware low level formats the platters before the drive is assembled.
also, even if you could, the firmware will never work right.

Finally, there is absolutely no reason for you do that. 4k sectors are vastly superior. They should be faster, have less errors, and less wasted space. The only possible problem is misalignment, and the only OS that is a problem for is windows XP. Vista and later, MacOS, linux, etc all align it properly automatically.

the only thing that concerns me with those drives, is the stupid workarounds for XP compatibility that could wreak havok on modern machines if you are not careful. Just say it doesn't support windows XP and be done with it, instead of being saddled with that crap.