I recently bought a new drive (specifically, a 2TB Samsung Spinpoint) that says on the label that it supports advanced format, and that I should download the tool from their site. Unless I'm missing something, mkntfs has always had its maximum sector size at 4096b: -s, --sector-size BYTES Specify the size of sectors in bytes. Valid sector size values are 256, 512, 1024, 2048 and 4096 bytes per sector. If omitted, mkntfs attempts to determine the sector-size automatically and if that fails a default of 512 bytes per sector is used. Will this tool on Samsung's site do anything other than format the drive in the same way doing mkntfs -s 4K /dev/sdb1 would do? To be specific, I'm intending to use this drive on a machine that will primarily run Windows XP, but I'd rather boot into Linux/BSD and format the disk manually than have bloated software. I do want to have the new AF style sectors though -- that's essential. So if I did the command above, would it have exactly the same effect as using the advanced format tool?