WD Advanced-Format HD's

[sleddriver]

Found this interesting:
http://www.wdc.com/global/products/features/?id=7&language=1

WD Advanced Format drives are specifically optimized for Mac and the latest Windows operating systems such as Windows Vista and Windows 7 with a clean install. Advanced Format Technology is being adopted by WD and other drive manufacturers to increase media format efficiency, thus enabling larger drive capacities.

Using your WD Advanced Format Hard Drive with a Windows Operating System may require you to run the WD Align Windows software utility after you install your operating system or partition and format the drive as a secondary drive. The WD Align software aligns existing partitions on the Advanced Format drive to ensure it provides full performance for certain configurations.

Anyone have experience with this?

 

[Rand]

basically if your drive isnt aligned you will end up reading 2 4k sectors instead of 1 and this makes it more than 50% slower.

all new drives will be going to 4k sectors in the future

ie no 3tb drives without.

what thats also saying is windows is smart enough to align the partition on a fresh install.

where you will have issues is with some disc cloning software etc.

 

[beast3300]

Interesting, my 1TB WD black edition just showed up today...... Time for my old raptor to eat a sh#% brick and die a miserable rattling death!

 

[PandaBear]

Aligning a mechanical drive isn't useful, as the internal sectors aren't aligned to servo sectors or tracks anyways.

What helps is the reduced overhead to store sector overhead, thus make the drives more efficient size wise. Any performance gain will be from increased data / overhead ratio.

 

[sleddriver]

Not quite sure I understood the first part. . . mechanical drive as opposed to virtual? solid-state? etc. Please elaborate.

 

[PandaBear]

In a mechanical drive, servo sectors (angular size)are not uniform in size and there're usually 16 zone with different density per servo sectors (angular length). That's why data access near the outer edge (front of the drive) is faster than the inner edge (end of the drive). Logical sectors (what OS uses, like 512 byte or 2048 / 4096 bytes) are not uniformly aligned across a servo sector, so the outer edge will have servo sectors that store, for example, 250.7 logical sectors each, and inner edge will have servo sectors that store, for example 97.2 sectors each.

Logical sectors are not aligned within the servo sectors because it would waste a lot of space, and most data access are multiple sectors to begin with, so the chances of needing to read / write across servo sectors are big to begin with anyways, and reading 2 servo sectors just to give you 1 logical sector because it land across the border (or even zone, or platter, or head) is very common. Aligning a mechanical drive is therefore useless.

Solid state drive (SSD, flash memory) are usually made to 2KB per page for read and write, so if your OS partition cluster (32KB each, for example) align to the drive's internal layout, it would be a lot faster and less wear and tear than if you are not aligned. For a 32KB cluster size, if it is out of alignment, it may need to read/write 34KB of data (N + 1 pages, N being the cluster size) each time, and that waste component life and performance for nothing.

As far as I know, the default alignment of partition is not aligned and most flash memory drives can get huge performance penalty if it is not formatted with the correct alignment. A lot of them provide tools for user format to keep the alignment perfect, but the formatting done when installing windows or OSX may not take this into consideration.

 

[Colt45ws]

Windows 7 is SSD aware and aligns the partitions properly.

 

[tmorris1]

Originally Posted By: beast3300
Interesting, my 1TB WD black edition just showed up today...... Time for my old raptor to eat a sh#% brick and die a miserable rattling death!

I don't think the WD Blacks use the newer format scheme.

 

[sleddriver]

Thanks for the explanation PB!