Formatting a new Samsung F4 HD204UI 2tb 4k sector drive Win7 x64?

[Wag]

I picked one of these up on sale and it should arrive in a few days. I've been reading up a bit on these new 4k drives, and am wondering if I need to do anything special to get the optimal performance out of it under Win7 x64? If I just do a standard format with 4k sectors is that enough?

 

[bankster55]

Thats a good question Not many AFT drives out there, and those that exist are probably not installed correctly - ignorance is bliss. Not much end user feedback/benchmarks on the web either.

Supposedly all drives will be AFT by 2011
Supposedly Win 7 is toally compliant and working with the new spec
http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3691
Ubuntu 10.10 and Snow Leopard 10.6.4 supposedly also full compliance

I have no AFT drives, but sooner or later I wont have any choice in the matter.

Edit: Removed some tech stuff

 

[ViRGE]

You won't need to do anything special, just partition and format the drive like normal. Win 6.x already writes partitions with 4K-aligned boundaries.

 

[Wag]

Thanks. I was beginning to regret I asked.

 

[bankster55]

Well, as it turns out looks like AFT is dead meat anyways
The softwares cant deal with the 4096byte sectors
Oh well, close but no cigar
http://www.dailytech.com/WD+Launches+3TB+Caviar+Internal+HDD+Breaks+22TB+Barrier/article19921.htm

If you buy one of the new big drives, you will need a PCIe 1X slot just for the new type bus host adapter, which will come with the drive
You will also need X64 for boot drive, and AHCI mode - no more IDE emulate SATA
Shazaam
How will the newb's handle all that?


And $239 is pretty bad for a 3TB Green drive, even tho its the intro price

 

[airmark]

I just got this drive and installed it in a Win7 64bit PC. It seems there's something wrong. I tried both MBR and GPT, and 4k and 512bytes formatting, but the result of the read benchmark looks like this:

For comparison's sake, the old F3 1.5 TB drive benchmark below:

Any clues?

 

[bankster55]

Ah, thnx for that screenie, very helpful to me

Critical questions:
WHAT sw did you use to format the drive?
(If you used Win 7 install, then you used internal diskpart)

If you used Win 7 and custom install mode
Did it DETECT drive during partitioning as 4096K?
In other words, before actual partitioning, did it show 512 sector and 4096 cluster or the correct 4096 sector and 4096 cluster (1 sector) in window?

Your post highlights the fact of the link I posted above, that 4096B sector WDC protocol is a failure. Not because the drive cant be correctly run in that mode, but the softwares cannot, like (especially) your benching utility, and also ESPECIALLY in X64

What is your mobo?

How exactly did you implement GPT?

What this means is formatting to an MBR based system is dead and gone, and your mobo must be late enough to support GUID, or you will need an addin card. There is also the possibility that we may need a specific "updated" GPT version now, or perhaps new HDD controller chips.

Your only hope (after you format and try setting 4096/4096 correctly) and it still doesnt work, during the interim period of conversion to GUID is to use an alignment tool that fixes failed emulation with 512Bytes alignment tool

http://www.paragon-software.com/business/partition-alignment/
https://www.paragon-software.com/product-tours/pat/presentation/index.htm

The Paragon alignment too was supposed to be needed ONLY for Win XP and 2000, and WITH the drive jumper on 7-8 pins, but that was assuming new protocol worked with Win 7/vista and wouldnt be needed there

There are a giant collection of comments on the WDC green EARS drives at newegg stating dead drives and no boot drives, but like i said, manuf put this stuff out to a public that has little notion of what to do. These drives are not dead - they are undecipherable, and if workable would prob corrupt O/S/data on drive after time, or quickly wear them out.

You also seem to have a system prob, as your "good" drive graphs poorly.Your CPU usage is way high on both drives and the burst on the new drive is horrible. (CPU speedstep/throttle?). But this does not mean the 4096 issue isnt also present, borking things

Let me know what happens

 

[airmark]

Ah, thnx for that screenie, very helpful to me

Critical questions:
WHAT sw did you use to format the drive?
(If you used Win 7 install, then you used internal diskpart)

If you used Win 7 and custom install mode
Did it DETECT drive during partitioning as 4096K?
In other words, before actual partitioning, did it show 512 sector and 4096 cluster or the correct 4096 sector and 4096 cluster (1 sector) in window?

Your post highlights the fact of the link I posted above, that 4096B sector WDC protocol is a failure. Not because the drive cant be correctly run in that mode, but the softwares cannot, like (especially) your benching utility, and also ESPECIALLY in X64

What is your mobo?

How exactly did you implement GPT?

What this means is formatting to an MBR based system is dead and gone, and your mobo must be late enough to support GUID, or you will need an addin card. There is also the possibility that we may need a specific "updated" GPT version now.

Your only hope (after you format and try setting 4096/4096 correctly) and it still doesnt work, during the interim period of conversion to GUID is using an alignment tool that EMULATES 512Bytes

http://www.paragon-software.com/business/partition-alignment/
https://www.paragon-software.com/product-tours/pat/presentation/index.htm

The Paragon alignment too was supposed to be needed ONLY for Win XP and 2000, and WITH the drive jumper on 7-8 pins, but that was assuming new protocol worked with Win 7/vista and wouldnt be needed there

There are a giant collection of comments on the WDC green EARS drives at newegg stating dead drives and no boot drives, but like i said, manuf put this stuff out to a public that has little notion of what to do. These drives are not dead - they are undecipherable, and if workable would prob corrupt O/S/data on drive after time, or quickly wear them out.

Let me know what happens

Thanks for the response.
My MB is the gigabyte 770ta-ud3, fairly new I think so it should support everything properly (but then again I would think installing a hard drive wouldn't be a problem either...)
I used Win7 to format the drive and the first thing it asked me was what type of partition to create, MBR or GPT, I chose GPT, thinking it would be better. Much later, after deleting everything, I re-partitioned it (again in Win7) using MBR. No change in performance. I also used EASEUS Partition Master 6.1 formatting it in several different formats again with no change in performance.
I find it ridiculous that I have to buy a third party commercial software just to be able to have my hard drive work in a fairly new system. Surely there must be another way, otherwise I'm returning it.
Btw, normally I don't really care about benchmarks, but it was real world performance that made me measure it this time. After I copied everything from my old drive to the new one, I selected all files in windows explorer and hit "properties" to see that the same total number of files and total bytes were in both drives. Windows took waaaay more time to count all the files in the new drive than in the old one, which seemed strange to me, and that's why I ran the benchmark. Otherwise I might have not even noticed at all (but suffered poor performance in the future).

 

[airmark]

As I said, the drive is now empty and I can partition and format it any way I need to, without worrying about data loss. What should I do to have it properly work?

 

[bankster55]

As I said, the drive is now empty and I can partition and format it any way I need to, without worrying about data loss. What should I do to have it properly work?

Yeah, a lot of folks are gonna be pissed

I was editing my post above as you were posting, so first note that your sys has a prob anyways with CPU usage that has to be rundown. There is no reason to have that CPU usage, seems to be throttled possibly by a bios setting for CPU power save
(see my screenie)

Besides that, format the drive again, use custom install, at the fomatting/partitioning window, set the two info windows at 4096 on the left (sectors) and 4096 on the right (cluster) and make ONE BIG PARTITION!
Install and test

 

[airmark]

CPU usage is high because it's a humble sempron 140 and i have all power saving settings on (cool & quiet plus a gigabyte utility) so it's utilized a lot on demand but the system still feels snappy. I can try playing around with the settings but I don't think that's a problem per se. For example, look at the screenshot for my boot drive, an intel x-25m:

Still very high CPU usage but very decent performance.

 

[airmark]

format the drive again, use custom install, at the fomatting/partitioning window, set the two info windows at 4096 on the left (sectors) and 4096 on the right (cluster) and make ONE BIG PARTITION!
Install and test

Forgive my ignorance, but where exactly do I perform this custom install with the two info windows? The only options I have managed to find in Windows 7 are for NTFS or FAT32 and allocation (cluster) size ranging from 512 bytes to 64KB (only one setting, no separate left or right).

 

[bankster55]

picking custom install during install routine just means YOU are doing the partitioning, manually setting
Edit: let me boot to a disk install routine to see
may take a coupla minutes

 

[bankster55]

arghhh!!
I dont know what the hell i was thinking
There is only the size option, after clicking new
I use so many damn partitioning softwares its all a blur.

512 sector drives partitions start at physical sector 63 and 4096 sector drives cannot do this properly
Win 7 O/S uses 1MB ofsett to set up HDD controller 512B emulation to accomplish this, and only its install diskpart makes the 1MB space . XP diskpart wont.
Win XP/2000 use 7-8 drive jumper and utility alignment tricks
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/04/01/the-facts-4k-advanced-format-hard-disks/1

So, lets cut to the chase here - lets see if THIS drive can be made to work
Put the F4 drive into one of the SATA 3.0 ports
Unplug power to all other HDD including SSD - to make sure we dont have to worry about any partitioning conflicts between drives
Boot to Win 7 DVD click install now and go to repair your computer, click that and pick recovery tools radio button and pick command prompt
Type: (enter after each line)
diskpart
list disk
select disk 0
clean
create partition primary size=25000
format fs=ntfs quick label=DSK0_VOL1
assign letter=C
active

now check to see if offsett is 1024KB (1 MiB)
Type:
select disk 0
list partition

Note by putting no size in diskpart it will create one big partition
With a 4096 physical sector drive I would do a full format not quick, but its fine for this little test
If correct exit out of DVD REBOOT and install Win 7

Run your benchmark

Next download and burn the gparted iso and burn it to disk, and keep it handy
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gpa...ble/0.6.4-1/gparted-live-0.6.4-1.iso/download

I found the gparted align thingy
You can align first partition start placement to cylinder or space in MiB Mebbibyte (1024K = 1MiB)
512 byte physical sector drives always align start at 32K (63rd sector X 512B = 32,256 bytes or 32KB)

FWIW Linux and Snow Leopard have absolutely none of the Windows problems with 4096 sectored drives

Edit: Changed diskpart command - added size

 

[airmark]

Did the diskpart repair thing. I assume you mean reboot and run windows (rather than install it) after that. Ran the benchmark, no improvement. Booting the Gparted live cd now to try the align thing. Will keep you posted.

 

[bankster55]

actually, the diskpart thing is not a repair, its a fresh partition and format to one big partition with the correct 1MB unallocated space for alignment

Muitiple partitions and dual booting are problems for the "work in progress" advanced format tech. Also low level formatting. Also drive imaging. Also cloning

"clean" diskpart command means wipe the disk of PT and MBR and MFT

and after that I wanted you to then actually install Win 7 on that partition, and run bench

If this still fails, then we could try manually making a 1MB previous space in Gparted before first partition, or align to (nearest) cylinders, which is what the SSD guys do

Edit: How can you "run" windows if its a single drive and you wiped it????
I instructed to unplug ALL OTHER HDD so we can test THIS drive by itself.
You cant run the F4 from a drive that has no 1024KB offsett.
The O/S HAS TO BE on the 4896 drive its using to work properly

 

[airmark]

OK, I misunderstood. What I did is reconnected all my other drives and booted as normal (from the SSD).
Now I'm running the Gparted and the 1MB empty space was after the 1.82TB big partition. So I selected the big partition, chose 1MiB free space preceding, 0MiB free space following, and align to MiB.
It's taking its time (although the drive is empty), which may be a good thing. 11.6GiB out of 1.82TiB read now, 10 hours remaining. Should I let it go (overnight) or cancel it?

 

[bankster55]

No, cancel out
Its MOVING all the sector addresses
Go back to the start and do the diskpart thing, but add "size=25000" to "create primary partition" line which is 25GB (ONLY)
REBOOT and install Win 7
Bench

THEN we will try the gparted
If you want this hashed out, you are gonna have to work WITH me here

 

[airmark]

ok doing it now. just did the diskpart thing and going to install win7 now.

 

[airmark]

installing windows now, but can you tell me what do you expect to change from that? when i did the diskpart thing the first time and booted normally, the benchmark was the same crap as the first time. As far as I know, installing windows won't actually change anything in terms of partitions etc. on the drive.

 

[airmark]

finished installation, downloaded benchmark. Exactly the same...

edit: actually not even the same, much worse. average read 18.3MB/s! (min 1, max 89.7), access time 35ms! burst rate 41.5MB/s!!!

 

[airmark]

so now what? gparted? try to move the partition leaving 1MiB before it?

 

[bankster55]

O.K. See I like to eliminate possibilities in a logical order
There are things involved here you are unaware of
So we confirm that your drive is still thrashing around as a single drive with the correct diskpart offset of 1024K, with its OWN install of Win 7. Right?

Before we get into gparted, I wish you would make a screenshot in diskpart just to eliminate any doubt here. You need to start the screenshot sw before cmd for some brands
Go to cmd prompt in windows and type
diskpart
select disk 0
select partition 1
detail partition

pull the window down so I can see the whole thing in the screenshot

Then we will try some things in gparted
I want to try 2 and 4 MiB and also round to nearest cylinder

also need you to downl hdtach
http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach

Waiting

 

[airmark]

here you are

also confirming that it's the only drive in the system right now with a fresh install of win 7 pro 64bit, all other drives are not connected.

 

[bankster55]

Ah, O.K. good, now we are cooking
1048576 bytes offset is 1MB
oops - you have Vol2 as partition 1 - and we made no 100MB reserved because we were prepartitioned
This is very interesting, maybe an insight here, the info I need
Go back and redo diskpart as such:
diskpart
select disk 0
list volume
select volume 1
detail volume
=======================
later:
Boot to gparted and highlight and delete that partition
Should be all unallocated space
Highlight the unallocated, and click new
Make a 25000 partition (25GB)
NTFS, primary, Vol label DSK0_VOL1
in the lower left click on align options and put 2 (Mib) in before window
Click apply
Right click the partition and click manage flags - check boot
apply
reboot and install Win 7 again
then we will try 4Mib
then try round to nearest cylinder