Support 4096-byte-sector-based hard drive

A brief introduction
Since the December of 2009, hard drive manufacturers begin to introduce and use 4096-byte-sector-based hard drive rather than commonly seen 512-byte-sector-based hard drive. However, most operating systems can not support this large sector hard drive well. In order to keep operating system run normally, users need to partition 4096-byte-sector-based hard drive to 512 byte logical partitions with firmware. Nevertheless, though this operation covers the change, the use of large physical sector brings hidden dangers to disk distribution and system performance. With the popularity of 4096-byte sector, strategies to deal with this new type of hard drive become more and more important.

Why change hard drive to 4096-byte-sector-based hard drive?
Users who are quite familiar with disk architecture know hard drive is divided into sectors, and each sector is 512 byte. All read-write operations will be performed in sectors. Seeing disk architecture carefully, we can find there are a large number of extra data between sectors, and these extra bytes are used by hard drive firmware to detect and correct errors in every sector. Since hard drive becomes larger and larger, more and more data need to be stored to per unit area of hard drive, resulting in more low-level errors. As a result, burden on error correction function of firmware is increased largely.

A good solution to this problem is increase 512 byte sector to larger sector so as to use more powerful error correction algorithm. These algorithms make every byte use less data, so larger sector can correct more errors. Therefore, there are 2 practical advantages to change hard drive to larger sector hard drive, namely promoting reliability and increasing disk capacity. It is theoretically true.

Data recovery and 4096 byte sector
With the popularity and application of 4096-byte-sector-based hard drive, especially aiming at RAID series, more and more large-capacity hard disks emerge. 40GB, 80GB, and 160GB hard drives have been out of date, and capacity of current hard drive ranges from 500GB to several TB.

Storage device updates unceasingly, and MiniTool Software Ltd., a company specially making research on data storage, makes a great break through, too. Aiming at 4096-byte-sector-based hard drive, MiniTool Software Ltd. updates and upgrades MiniTool Power Data Recovery from 6.6 to 6.8, and the new version MiniTool Power Data Recovery can support data recovery on 4096-byte-sector-based hard drive better. Moreover, it supports dozens formats of RAW file recovery, like *.m4v, *.3g2, *.wtv, *.wrf, *.pps, *.dps, *.sr2, *.max, *.qcd, *.7z, *.tar, *.vcf, *.apk, *.drw, *.jar, and *.veg. At the same time, some bugs of this software have been fixed.