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Advanced Format with Windows XP

S

SirRob

Member
I have googled and searched on this forum, but I have not been able to find all of the answers that I am looking fro regarding advanced format drives and Windows XP. Feel free to link to other posts if I simply missed them.

My understanding is that WD, Samsung, and possibly Hitachi drives have jumpers to enable usage in Windows XP. You first either need to format them in Windows 7 or Vista or use the respective manufacturer's tools to realign the drive after formatting in Windows XP. If I do not desire to create more than one partition I am done. Is all of this correct, or am I missing something? Also, will there be a performance hit for using advanced format drives with XP?
 
I have Windows 7 machines that I can use to format the drive, but I will be using the drive in a Windows XP box. It sounds like the best solution is to format it in Windows XP, without the jumper, and use the align utility. This way I can move the hard drive to a Windows 7 box later without any problems. Right?
 
The 32MB cache drives from WD dont use advanced format. WD20EARS has advanced format, whereas WD20EADS doesn't. I don't think the hitachi drives use it either, couldnt find anything suggesting they do on their site.

And yes, i think you're right.
 
SirRob said:
All current 2 TB drives seem to be using advanced format.
Click to expand...
Unless WDC has discontinued them, they also sell a 512MB Sector version of their 2 TB disks. I own one.

To get back to your original question, though, I haven't seen a definitive test of 512MB versus 4K Sector disks and what happens when you use 4K disks with the jumpers or software-aligned. I know I got surprisingly low throughput in a brand-new WDC 2TB 4K-Sector "Green" disk when I jumpered it and used it on a Server 2003 machine. I don't have the numbers at hand, but I believe that HDTune 2.55 was only seeing like 60 MegaByte/sec reads across eSATA. I'm used to somewhat higher numbers across eSATA, even with 5400 RPM disks.
 
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WD 2TB EADS with 4x500GB platters still uses normal 512 byte sectors. The newer EARS with 3x666GB platters is better since it has higher data density and thus sequential performance. Older EARS are also 4K sectors but have 4x500GB platters just like EADS and thus is slower. So be careful about which EARS you buy as there are two versions!

The Samsung F4 series look really nice; but still no native 4K sector drives yet. They all emulate and report as having 512 byte sectors. This can cause slowdowns if you don't properly align the drive.

For Windows XP:
Option 1) Use the Jumper and create partition inside XP setup
Option 2) Use Gparted or Vista/Win7 to create partition then install XP and don't use the jumper

For Windows Vista/Win7:
Don't use the jumper. Install per normal. Let Windows setup create the partition. Be careful about cloning programs which create misaligned partitions; best is to install fresh.
 
Thanks for the replies! On Samsung's website it states "Byte per Sector: 4K Sector with Emulation"

http://www.samsung.com/global/busine...=552&ppmi=1219

What does that mean? I read that it puts eight 512 byte writes into a 4k sector. Does that mean that the hard drive does this grouping internally and I do not have to worry about where I format the drive (XP or 7)? I am heavily leaning towards the Samsung, so I want to know before pulling the trigger today.
 
Emulation is not that good; it can lower performance considerably when writing small files. But for normal NTFS systems and aligned partitions this shouldn't be much of an issue.

If you are going to use Windows XP, then i suggest not using the jumper but using Vista/Win7/GParted to create the partition for you; then it will be aligned without usage of the jumper on XP and any other OS you move that disk to. So this would be the best setup.

Note that Windows XP might be more affected by the emulation; generally i recommend not using XP anymore because it is getting dated; the core OS is over 10 years old. The main difference with XP NTFS and Vista+ NTFS is that XP aligns to 512 byte sectors while Vista and up align to 4KiB logical chunks instead. This is separate from partition alignment, and can't be tweaked.

But really, you should be fine if you just align the partition; the problems of 4K sectors don't affect windows users that much; assuming they have aligned their partitions.
 
Thanks for the quick answers and explanations. Most of the files that I will be writing are 2 meg or more (tons of family pictures and videos). The drive will simply be for data redundancy on a home file server that has been running XP for a long time.

I am not averse to running another OS, but the hardware would not do well with win7, and all of the other machines are Windows based. My experience with networking Linux and extracting data off of failed linux drives has not been as easy and maintenance free as just using XP. Also, there are a handful of Windows only programs that I run from the server. So that is why I am where I am for now. I do have a few Win7 licenses, but I hate to upgrade an old server to run 7 and use up one of my licenses.
 
RebateMonger said:
Unless WDC has discontinued them, they also sell a 512MB Sector version of their 2 TB disks. I own one.

To get back to your original question, though, I haven't seen a definitive test of 512MB versus 4K Sector disks and what happens when you use 4K disks with the jumpers or software-aligned. I know I got surprisingly low throughput in a brand-new WDC 2TB 4K-Sector "Green" disk when I jumpered it and used it on a Server 2003 machine. I don't have the numbers at hand, but I believe that HDTune 2.55 was only seeing like 60 MegaByte/sec reads across eSATA. I'm used to somewhat higher numbers across eSATA, even with 5400 RPM disks.
Click to expand...

RebateMonger, you need to stop using that time machine.
512MB sectors are on your 2 zettabyte drive right ?:sneaky: 😉

For what it is worth, there is a slight performance hit that you will get by using 512 byte sectors vs 4K. Normally you don't see that big of a hit, but if you transfer huge files, then the hit is worse.
 
So transferring a lot of small files that overlap would take a worse hit than several large files that also overlap due to fewer overlaps overall, although the total space on hard drive required may be equivalent.
 
SirRob said:
So transferring a lot of small files that overlap would take a worse hit than several large files that also overlap due to fewer overlaps overall, although the total space on hard drive required may be equivalent.
Click to expand...

It depends on how the OS is submitting the I/Os. With a large file you may still see slowdowns because the OS won't be able to submit the entire file as one big I/O so you'll have multiple, smaller, sector overlapping I/Os. It's really just better to move on from XP at this point...
 
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