Advanced Format Hard Drive

[friendly_jacek]

i bought a new (and cheap after rebate) 1TB WD green drive for a backup duty. this is my second HD with the Advanced Format. the first one required Intel® Rapid Storage Technology to work correctly in Vista: http://www.bobistheoilguy.com/forums/ubbthreads.php/topics/3711283/Intel%C2%AE_Rapid_Storage_Technolog#Post3711283

this one will be used to back up a mix of a few home PCs/laptops running either XP, Vista, or 7. Acronis is my most recent backup software (I used ghost in the past). do i need to use the the WD Align utility for the disk to work correctly?

so far i formatted it with partitionmagic in linux.

thanks!

 

[friendly_jacek]

my bad, it was PartedMagic. based on my further reading, it should be OK.

 

[Donald]

The advanced format is just 4K blocks rather than 512 byte blocks. Almost all recent operating systems can handle it properly.

 

[emg]

Originally Posted By: Donald
The advanced format is just 4K blocks rather than 512 byte blocks. Almost all recent operating systems can handle it properly.


XP isn't a recent operating system

.

For a backup drive, it should be fine. The big problem with these disks is random 512 byte writes, which require a full read/write cycle that can slow the disk to a crawl. If you're copying big files onto the disk, it should be able to combine the writes into 4k blocks and not need to read the old data before it writes the new.

Also, I suspect that, if you format the disk on Windows 7, it will ensure the filesystem is aligned correctly to minimize problems on other operating systems.

 

[mattwithcats]

If your running a Western Digital Green or Red drive,
you need to adjust the idle time.

Factory setting is 8 seconds,
however Windows can pause up to 12 seconds between writes.

Hence the drive constantly spins up, ands down,
resulting in early failure...

Set to 60-300 seconds, do not disable...

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=113

 

[friendly_jacek]

Originally Posted By: mattwithcats
If your running a Western Digital Green or Red drive,
you need to adjust the idle time.

Factory setting is 8 seconds,
however Windows can pause up to 12 seconds between writes.

Hence the drive constantly spins up, ands down,
resulting in early failure...

Set to 60-300 seconds, do not disable...

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=113


Quote:
This utility is designed to upgrade the firmware of the following hard drives: WD1000FYPS-01ZKB0, WD7500AYPS-01ZKB0, WD7501AYPS-01ZKB0.

CAUTION: Do not attempt to run this software on any hard drives other than what is listed above. Please make sure that the computer system is not turned off during the firmware upgrade. Doing so may damage the hard drive beyond repair and your data may be lost.


i don't think i have one of those, but will check.

 

[armos]

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh848035%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
shows what service packs or patches are required for "advanced format" 512E support in the different versions of Windows.
Windows Vista and 7 both require some degree of updates to handle it correctly.
You would need to have the required updates installed first before creating the partitions. That can be a problem when trying to install an OS, since the install disc might not be patched.

If the partitions aren't correctly aligned the drive will still work, but performance will be impaired.

If you created the partitions in gparted with the option "align to 1MB boundary" enabled, then it's aligned correctly. Sufficiently recent versions of gparted have that option.


Originally Posted By: mattwithcats
[...]Hence the drive constantly spins up, ands down, resulting in early failure...

Just a minor correction - the drive isn't spinning down the platters, but it is parking the heads. The constant head parking is a big problem though. I had a 2.5" Hitachi system drive on a file server that was apparently doing this. I didn't notice until it started having difficulty unparking the heads after about 6 months. I found it had logged hundreds of thousands of head load/unload cycles in that time. It ruined the drive.
Automatic head parking is quite a dumb "feature" - head parking should be left under the control of the operating system. I think the HDD manufacturers started doing this just so they could quote lower idle power figures, even though the exact same result could be achieved by having the OS handle it, and the OS could handle it far more intelligently. It has been possible to park heads through software command since the days of MS-DOS.
I guess they can't take credit for head parking in their idle power figures unless the head parking is brain dead autonomous, so this unnecessary behavior is the result.