Western Digital has yet to actively market its "advanced format" hard drives -- in fact, there's a decent chance you've no idea what we're talking about if you weren't tuned in on December 11th. In short, it's a technology that alters a hard drive's sector size from 512 bytes (the standard for the past three decades) to 4096K, which enables the ECC data to be stored in a more efficient manner. Just recently, WD began to ship Advanced Format Caviar Green hard drives, and the benchmarking gurus over at Hot Hardware strapped one in to see exactly how much of the hype was warranted. For starters, they debunked the thought that Advanced Fo
