It refers to the new 4k sector advanced format drives where partitions have to be aligned to be on the 4k boundries for optimal speed. Win7/8 format will format and align drives correctly.
You can check alignment with a benchmark tool or with Diskpart. It should be correct for a new installation, but is worth checking--especially for partitions that have been restored. In Diskpart, the offset for a partition should be evenly divisible by 4. My two hard drives each have a single partition with an offset of 1024.
The benefits are higher speeds and likely fewer unrecoverable read errors. Windows 7 and newer blindly align to 1MB, as do common non-Windows partitioning tools (parted, fdisk, gdisk).
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