There is not really a lot that users can do to improve the performance of a hard drive on a computer system. This however is changing currently with the introduction of the first Advanced Format hard drives that some PC manufacturers have started to add to their systems. The main difference is that AF drives use a 4K physical sector instead of a 512 byte logical sector that conventional hard drives use. The Advanced Format drives emulate that sector for compatibility reasons. The core benefit of the new technology is that data can be stored more efficiently.