AF 512e Hard Drive

I received a new Dell M6600 laptop with two drives a standard SATA and a SSD.  The box the laptop came in had an ominous orange note saying one or more of my drives may be one the new the new Advanced Format 512e drives.  The note pointed out that it is important to understand the implications of the new drive and how that relates to the OS to be installed.

The AF 512e drive is formatted using 4K sectors vrs the old school 512 bytes sector but emulates 512 for backwards compatibility with today’s OS’s.  From what I found online Windows 7 and the newest Linux versions (like RHEL 6)support AF 512e natively but older Windows/Linux distros have to have special considerations, specifically ensuring that the partitions are aligned correctly.

I really wanted to know what drive I had since I intended on installing RHEL5.5 which would involve extra work to insure the drive was partitioned correctly to use  AF512e.  I also needed to know which drive(s) were AF512e.

<RANT>Anyway according to the Dell propaganda that came with the laptop I could download software called “Dell advanced Format HDD Detection Tool”.  So I goto the link provided which leads to their Drivers and page where I put the system tag number and there is no such software available.  I searched everywhere on Dell’s site and found nothing but links back to the driver page.  </RANT>  

Another option was to disassemble the laptop and check the drive for an “AF” symbol on the label. Luckily this  info can be gained from the command line as well in Windows 7 using fsutil. The fsutil you use must be v3 which comes as part of KB9822018.
So I went ahead and ran the default Win7 setup that the new laptop had pre-installed and went to work.  It turned out the SSD was an AF512e drive.

At the command prompt enter

fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo c:

Look for these lines:

A standard 512 byte drive will show
“Bytes Per Sector :           512”
“Bytes Per Physical Sector : 512”

While a AF512e drive will return
“Bytes Per Sector :           512”
“Bytes Per Physical Sector : 4096”

So knowing that I had AF512e drive I decided to go with RHEL 6 instead of RHEL 5 since it could supposedly handle the drive.

The RHEL 6 install went without a hitch.  And a quick fdisk -l /dev/sdb showed the the start sector for the partition was 2048 which is divisible by 512 so the partition seems to be aligned correctly as I have read online.

That part of the job was now done.