Hello,
I have Toshiba MK3259GSXP Laptop HDD in my Sony laptop. Recently SMART indicated disk failure and it's likely to fail.
I booted using Linux rescue CD and ran fdisk, hdparm as well as smartctl commands.
I am bit puzzled to notice physical sector size as 512 bytes where the model number indicates Advanced Format (AF)
Even specs on Toshiba site indicate AF for this model. Here's the snapshot of smartctl.
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root@sysresccd /root % smartctl --all /dev/sda
smartctl 5.42 2011-10-20 r3458 [i686-linux-3.0.13-std241-i586] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Toshiba 2.5" HDD MK..59GSXP (Adv. Format)
Device Model: TOSHIBA MK3259GSXP
Serial Number: 12LQC2H6T
LU WWN Device Id: 5 000039 3c3f88b29
Firmware Version: GT001H
User Capacity: 320,072,933,376 bytes [320 GB]
Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical
Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is: 8
ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is: Wed Jul 10 10:58:08 2013 UTC
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
See vendor-specific Attribute list for failed Attributes.

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Could someone throw further light on this, is this HDD actually AF?
Thx.

Yes, it is an AF drive (4k physical sectors). It uses 512e (512 byte host emulation) but some AF drives, like this one, also lie to the host about their physical sector size. Treat it as an AF drive and align the partitions appropriately to get the best performance.

Edited to add: I see your drive seems to be indicating a "SMART failure". Are you going to supply the full SMART data (e.g. from smartctl -x) for readers here to review, or were you just asking about AF?

Thanks Vulcan for this info. Yes I was mainly curious to know about AF.

FYI, the "r ioctl,2" option for the smartctl command produces an Identify Device data block in the following format:

===== [IDENTIFY DEVICE] DATA START (BASE-16) =====
000-015: 5a 0c ff 3f 37 c8 10 00 00 00 00 00 3f 00 00 00
016-031: 00 00 00 00 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20
032-047: 56 39 31 53 36 59 32 41 00 00 00 00 04 00 44 53
...

Example: smartctl -a -r ioctl,2 /dev/ice

Man page of SMARTCTL:
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ma ... ctl.8.html

An examination of the above data will reveal why smartctl is unable to detect the drive's real physical sector size.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.