# 4K Advanced Format drives - your experiences?



## Harpmaker (Oct 28, 2007)

I'm finally running out of space on my current media drive that I connect to my PC via external USB and began looking for a replacement for it. I was rather shocked to see the number of bad customer comments on many of the hard drives 1 TB and larger in capacity. When I delved into these new drives I found that they use the new industry standard 4K Advanced Format rather than the old 512b standard that has been in use on HDD's since 1956. The problem is that older Operating Systems (all Windows versions before Vista, older Linux and OSX versions) assume the HDD sector size is 512 bytes and don't natively see 4K sectors. There are work-arounds for this problem, but people are still having some trouble using the new format drives; thus this thread.

What are your experiences with the new Advanced Format drives?

In case you aren't aware what Advanced Format is here are some links to get you up to speed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/04/01/the-facts-4k-advanced-format-hard-disks/1
https://blogs.sans.org/computer-forensics/2010/07/28/windows-7-mbr-advanced-format-drives-e512/


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## Infrasonic (Sep 28, 2010)

Hi Don, while I haven't played with any of the new drives there is a pretty good review of one the first 3TB drives on the market *here*. From what I can tell (and I may be wrong) the 4K AF format will only be used on drives larger than 2TB. That means you can buy and use any 2TB and smaller drive to use on your system without any issues (if you are running a XP SP2 or newer OS).

I am a big fan of WD hard drives and have a lot of luck with the "Green" series that they offer. The drives are large, run quiet & cool and are pretty good performers. They are not meant to be used in a RAID though if that is your intention. 

I bet there will some excellent Black Friday deals but here are a couple Newegg listings if you are interested today:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136764

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136514

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136317


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## Harpmaker (Oct 28, 2007)

Infrasonic said:


> Hi Don, while I haven't played with any of the new drives there is a pretty good review of one the first 3TB drives on the market *here*. From what I can tell (and I may be wrong) the 4K AF format will only be used on drives larger than 2TB. That means you can buy and use any 2TB and smaller drive to use on your system without any issues (if you are running a XP SP2 or newer OS).


Thanks for the reply! Unfortunately you are incorrect about only drives larger than 2TB using AF. WD has a 1.5TB (and I think even a 1TB) version of their EARS series (the RS means it's an AF drive).

As for OS's, on the Windows side only Vista and up will take the AF drives without problems or having to either jumper the drive or run special free software from WD to properly align the drive sectors after formatting.

My biggest gripe on this whole AF deal is that for MANY people this will be a huge problem and the drive manufacturers are almost silent on the matter. It's only after someone has a problem and complains that they find out what they should have done in the first place to get the drive working with "obsolete" OS's like XP. XP may be showing a few gray hairs, but I certainly wouldn't call it obsolete.

Sorry for the mini-rant. I suspect I will be doing a bit more ranting before this thread is done...



> I am a big fan of WD hard drives and have a lot of luck with the "Green" series that they offer. The drives are large, run quiet & cool and are pretty good performers. They are not meant to be used in a RAID though if that is your intention.


Thanks for this as well. I too favor the WD Green drives. I just got a WD 2TB EARS drive from Newegg (the second link you gave) and will be setting it up as a NTFS external USB drive on a XP PC to hold video and audio data. Since I will be using only a single partition I don't expect any real problems. I have my fingers crossed though.


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## Infrasonic (Sep 28, 2010)

Wow, I guess I do have an AF drive then! I have one of the 1.5TB Green EARS drives in an external enclosure (w/ USB 2 & ESATA). Now that you mention it I will have to connect it to an XP machine to see if it has any issues (I've only used it with Vista and 7 so far). I'll let you know if there are any problems.

If you are going to be doing much transferring from your new external drive to your PC do yourself a favor and go with an enclosure that uses ESATA. I can write around a constant 100 MB/s which really helps when dealing with HD video.

This is the *enclosure* I use. I also picked *this* up since my case and mobo didn't have an ESATA port.


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## Harpmaker (Oct 28, 2007)

Infrasonic said:


> Wow, I guess I do have an AF drive then! I have one of the 1.5TB Green EARS drives in an external enclosure (w/ USB 2 & ESATA). Now that you mention it I will have to connect it to an XP machine to see if it has any issues (I've only used it with Vista and 7 so far). I'll let you know if there are any problems.


With the WD drives you can simply jumper pins 7 and 8 on the drive and it will add +1 on every OS sector request which should solve the offset problem AF has with older OS's that assume a hard disk starts at sector 63 (AF starts on sector 64 I think, but whatever this fixes the problem). This technique will not work with drives that have more than one partition. For those you must run WD's alignment program which you can find here.

Something I was surprised to find is that my WD drive DID NOT come with the required jumper! That isn't a real problem for me since I have enough old or dead HDD's around so I can rob one from one of them, but still, you think they could include a cotten-pickin' jumper for them that needs it. 

Whew! That was a close one - felt another rant coming on, but managed to fight it off for once. :R

More good AF info here.



> If you are going to be doing much transferring from your new external drive to your PC do yourself a favor and go with an enclosure that uses ESATA. I can write around a constant 100 MB/s which really helps when dealing with HD video.
> 
> This is the *enclosure* I use. I also picked *this* up since my case and mobo didn't have an ESATA port.


Thanks for the link, I didn't know they made a connector like that! I should have gone with eSATA, but my mobo doesn't have that onboard so I'm just using USB 2.0 for now. Luckily I don't write to the drive more than to move the data there a single time (usually when ripping) so speed isn't a significant factor, but I will probably go with that connector in the near future. :T

Rather than have a bunch of drive enclosures and their power supplies (which can be different from brand to brand of enclosure) I've gone with an external HDD dock. So far they have worked well for me.

From what I have read (only been looking into this for several days), the misalignment problem can cause different types of problems depending on how the drive is used. For my application the problem is a slowing of performance and possibly shortening the life of the drive since is must make multiple reads to get what should be read with one read.

People using an non-aligned AF drive and trying to install XP on it have had the system slow to a crawl and then stop! They blame the drive for being bad when it's really a data alignment problem that can be easily fixed BEFORE XP is installed.


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## Harpmaker (Oct 28, 2007)

I'll document my experience with the AF drive. I'm using a XP PC which I intend to eventually configure to dual boot some flavor of Linux.

Since my WD 2TB EARS drive didn't come with a jumper I decided to go with WD's software solution to the alignment problem under XP. Tom's Hardware doesn't think much of the jumper solution anyway.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wd-4k-sector,2554-3.html

For the last several years I have been using a free program called GPARTED (*G*nome *Part*ition *Ed*itor) to partition and format my hard drives. I love this program, or really I should say disc since the flavor of GPARTED I'm using is a "live CD" that contains all the programs that make up the GPARTED suite and a GUI that runs them. Live CD's are usually Linux-based CD's that one boots from to run the program or programs on them.

After launching the GPARTED CD I accepted the default values for several questions during the boot process. After the GUI started it scanned my system and found a number of hard drives and even a few flash cards it counted, as XP does, as Removable Media and thus could also be partitioned and formatted by the program. A note of warning to Windows users that try out GPARTED; this program runs under Linux and so uses the Linux naming structure for drives - which means no drive letters! Now I can usually tell what drives are what by their capacities, but this time I had two drives show up as 2TB (the new WD Green EARS and the older WD Green 2TB drive that it will be replacing since it is almost full). I simply turned off the older 2TB drive to make sure I didn't mess it up. 

I partitioned the new AF drive with the default settings (one large partition and a few other setting I don't remember) and then formatted it to NTFS. The whole process took only seconds, less time than when the program scanned the system for all connected drives!

I then rebooted to XP and found the new drive with no problem. I didn't know what GPARTED did or didn't do to align the drive so I installed and ran WD's alignment program. To my surprise that program reported that even though an alignable drive was found (the new AF drive) it was already aligned! I can only assume that GPARTED did that when it partitioned the drive.

http://gparted.org/

I would also like to add that the new WD 2TB EARS drive is EXTREMELY quiet! Quieter than the older WD 2TB drive and much quieter than the Seagate drives I have in my PC.


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## Senn20 (Jan 5, 2009)

Infrasonic said:


> If you are going to be doing much transferring from your new external drive to your PC do yourself a favor and go with an enclosure that uses ESATA. I can write around a constant 100 MB/s which really helps when dealing with HD video.
> 
> This is the *enclosure* I use. I also picked *this* up since my case and mobo didn't have an ESATA port.


Rosewill also makes a nice aluminum enclosure with USB & eSata for about $30. It's also available and Newegg. Comes with a fan which you really want if you're doing some heavy lifting with your drive. The fan is not exactly quiet, but it is switchable. 

Somebody recommended Raid setups earlier. I recommend Western Digital RE3 drives for the task. They're not cheap at $150 each but they're "Enterprise Grade" drives so they're durable.


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