Here is TeraByte's opinion. From the Newsgroup.
For some reason many users are thinking there is something special about these new drives with internal 4K sectors and that they require "advanced formatting" to function properly. Let me just nip it in the bud now - this is mainly marketing BS.
This should all be obvious to anyone with basic knowledge of drives/file
systems and the link. Here's some simple brief information:
What's the deal with the 4K sectors?
A sector is the smallest unit/block of data a drive can transfer. A traditional hard drive has used 512 byte sectors and the plan to change to a larger internal sector size has been in the works for years and now there are drives that are using 4K sectors. The larger sector sizes allow there to be more data on the same platter because there is a gap between each sector (including the ECC data). These drives are still fully compatibly with all existing software and operating systems because they (properly) provide a 512 byte sector view and internally handle read/writing in 4K chunks using read-modify-write. With proper caching technology (built into the drive) the affects of this should be negligible on typical desktops.
What about this alignment stuff?
Alignment has to do with where the partitions and data are located on the drive. Obviously the "optimal" location is where all data to be
read/written are contained in the least number of sectors; however, it's
marketed simply as aligning partitions to the size of a sector (or block for
devices not using sectors). The reality is you may have a more optimal
configuration or setup if the partitions are not aligned to the size of a
sector - what matters is where and how IO occurs on the drive which is
dependant on the applications (including OS) use of data, file system in
use, the file system driver implementation, and any cache manager
implementation.
On the application side of things, one given is the OS paging file which can
be heavily used by the OS. The OS will read/write an entire page which is
4096 bytes (4K) so having that file aligned to a sector size is probably the biggest single alignment factor on a typical desktop computer. For that file to be aligned, the clusters of the file system need to be aligned (see below). While we're talking about the page file, if your file system
cluster size is < 4K you'd also want to ensure that the page file is not
fragmented or that could affect performance as well.
For the file systems, NTFS clusters (allocation units) occur starting at the
start of a partition so if that partition is aligned on a sector size, so
will a cluster. For FAT the data may not be aligned even if the partition
is aligned on a sector size. However, you can use BootIt Next Generation (BING) to format a FAT/FAT32 partition using "align for NTFS" which will be aligned; you can also use BING to align an existing FAT/FAT32 partition using its "slide" / "align for NTFS only" option. BING is located at
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootit-next-generation.htmHowever, even if a cluster is sector aligned, it doesn't mean the file
system driver is going to read/write entire clusters at a time (in fact that
would normally be a waste of time and slow file access way down). The only time you will see that is if either the file system driver is poorly
implemented, or for security the writes on newly allocated clusters are zero padded (to end of new cluster) for security.
Another factor is a cache manager. If this cache manager reads or writes
entire clusters (or multiple of clusters) then having a cluster aligned with
a sector size will be optimal for the cache manager and hence anything that uses it.
What's the bottom line on alignment and Windows?
Due to the cache manager and paging file it's probably best that you align
your partitions (particularly on heavy used servers/systems). You can use BootIt Next Generation to align your new or existing partitions by enabling its Align 2048 setting (you should also disable Align on End, enable Align MBR End HS - see manual for details at
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/support-bootit-next-generation.htm ) before creating the partition or before using its slide (move) option to move the partition location.
However, if your partitions are not aligned or you don't want to align them then simply don't worry about it because the system will continue to function. If you find that the performance is not as expected then align them at your convenience to see if that was the cause of your performance issues.