High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Advanced Format is a generic term pertaining to any sector format used to store data on the magnetic disks in hard disk drives that exceeds 512 to 520 bytes per sector. Advanced Format is also considered a milestone technology in the history of hard-drive storage, where data has been processed in 512-byte increments since the inception of the hard-disk drive in 1956. Changing the sector format convention to larger data sectors, such as the 4,096-byte structure used in the first generation of Advanced Format technologies, uses the storage surface area more efficiently for large files but less efficiently for smaller files, while enabling the integration of stronger error correction algorithms to maintain data integrity at higher storage densities.