I'd not heard of it before, and a quick poke at the internet doesn't really show anything beyond a move to 4k sectors (and therefore presumably less efficient storage for lots of small files).
Is there something more I should know about? (in the market for a new home storage box soonish)
You get a huge performance impact if the OS doesn't align the clusters to the sectors. From the wikipedia article:
The translation process is more complicated when writing data that is either not a multiple of 4K or not aligned to a 4K boundary. In these instances, the hard drive must read the entire 4,096-byte sector containing the targeted data into internal memory, integrate the new data into the previously existing data and then rewrite the entire 4,096-byte sector onto the disk media. This operation, known as read-modify-write (RMW), can require additional revolution of the magnetic disks, resulting in a perceptible performance impact to the system user
Most of the OSes correctly align the advanced format sectors.
I switched from AR to Sequel about 3 years ago and haven't looked back. It's a far superior ORM and much easier to extend than AR. Jeremy is an excellent steward of the project.
