4KB Secotrs & XP

[BarkingGhostar]

Morning all,

I have a couple of new Western Digital Green Cavier 2TB drives and these are apparently leaving the factory with 4KB sectors. When I install then into a pre-existing Microsoft Windows XP pro environment it initializes the disk. But when I go to format them, should I be using the 4,096-byte sector size to format the drives?

Once formatted these pair of drives will be installed into an external docking station and connected via USB to the intended host computer.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Morning all,

I have a couple of new Western Digital Green Cavier 2TB drives and these are apparently leaving the factory with 4KB sectors. When I install then into a pre-existing Microsoft Windows XP pro environment it initializes the disk. But when I go to format them, should I be using the 4,096-byte sector size to format the drives?

Once formatted these pair of drives will be installed into an external docking station and connected via USB to the intended host computer.

Cluster size and sector size are unrelated, although one would think that setting them equal would somehow be optimum.

The problem with XP is, it aligns disks to a 63-sector offset, which is not evenly divisible into 4KB sectors, so every 4KB cluster in the filesystem is in fact mis-aligned onto those 4KB sectors, which slows everything down quite a bit.

You need to partition them with Vista or Win7, so that the partitions are aligned to 1024-sector offset, then format them in XP.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

Actually, I initialized the disk while in the external USB docking station, created a primary partition using the default settings, but performing a quick format. I then found and d/l the Paragon alignment tool on the WDC website, installed and ran it.

The alignment s/w correctly found the misaligned disk and offered to align it. I ran the alignment. I did this completely under 32-bit XP. The interesting thing is on WDC's website they had you go through some simply and brief questions on intent, which included using 32-bit XP, for a drive in an external USB enclosure. Neeto.

 

[imagoon]

You just use Diskpart in windows XP to partition and format the disk on another computer.

list disk
select disk (number of the new drive)
list partition
(should report it is blank)
create partition primary offset=4096

 

[taltamir]

Morning all,

I have a couple of new Western Digital Green Cavier 2TB drives and these are apparently leaving the factory with 4KB sectors.

1. all newer drives from WD, seagate, and samsung use 4kb sectors.
2. None of the 4kb sector drives actually exposes that to the OS, they all lie to it, telling it they have 512b sectors (0.5kb) like all the older drives; their controller then manages the conversion.
3. XP has alignment issues with 4kb spindle disks and with SSDs... but you can manually create the partitions with some other program and make sure they are aligned before installing winXP.