Glad to hear you are happy now
These really are good drives actually.
In a way you forced me to do a lot of investigating about 4096B sectored drives that I prob would not have done normally.
This thread has gotten almost 10,300 hits in 6 weeks, and I'm willing to bet that it doubles again in another 6 weeks. If you google anything about formatting these drives it points you right here. There seems to be a real interest in this topic that has not been fullfilled by the normal HDD reviews.
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O.K. back to the subject at hand, for all those peeps coming in from a google search.
Still fooling around with the Paragon PAT tool (Paragon Alignment Tool)
This utility (132MB) essentially resets the partition "alignment" which is just the offset to the first usable physical known sector of the first partition. It basically looks to see if the offset is okey dokey for 4096B sector emulated drives so that the emulator chip(s) on the HDD PCB can do its translation with no issues. If you are installing Win 7 and partition with Win 7, you
have no issues. You are home free.
If you are just using the drive for data - no O/S present - you have
absolutely no issues.
Now you might be asking yourself "if its so easy to properly install an AFT drive, with just a simple precaution, then why are you going on with all this tech stuff?" Well, if this thread only had a couple hunded hits, I'd have been long gone - trust me. But as the post count kept going higher and higher, I just said what the heck, why not.
Continuing..........
Important point; The offset is laid out upon creation of first partition. After that it does not matter what you do as far as partitioning. The offset is cast in cement when you make partition C. The 30 year old MSDos MBR 512B 63 sector HDD system ALWAYS uses the 32K offset, whether its just a 32K offset by itself (63 sectors X 512B = 32K) i.e. "full" - or a 32K series of sectors embedded in a 1024K offset with 992K of unallocated space. That IS the MBR protocol. The first physical sector of the first partition begins at the 63rd sector.The ONLY way you can get away from this is EFI bios and GPT.
In usage when the Paragon utility shows aligning can help, PAT resets the offset to a working value and then in reboot offline mode moves ALL those LBA addresses accordingly downward. Usually, that means a 32K offset is changed to 1024K which is 1MB (1024K = 1024B X 1024) and is buried at end of 1024K leaving about 992K unallocated prior space also.
For a 2TB drive thats around 4.3 billion hex addresses, which takes about 1.5 hours on 2TB drive with a reasonably fast CPU. If you interrupt this at any time you possibly have trashed the HDD data. Might be recoverable, might not.
Now this - Win 7 has no prob with install into an already present XP O/S 32K offset, and Win XP install has no prob with an aleady present 1024K offset if you PICK it during install. XP diskpart creates a 32K offset and Win 7 diskpart creates a 1024K offset - thats just the way it is. And diskpart is the internal engine that does the partitioning if you instruct any Windows install to make your partitions.
I had a prob I thought this utility might solve. My original XP X64 install from years ago is customized over a long time to my perfect config. As such I always keep a clone or two of this system around on other drives. When I first started dual booting it with first Vista, then Win 7 I would clone the fav XP to another drive then add Vista or Win 7 as a dual boot, then clone that, then later triple boot with ubuntu, then clone that whole drive.
When cloning, I always hard clone - a bit for bit copy of the original to another drive - no imaging. (Images are usually compressed, proprietary and need the sw to transfer back) Since I continually used my super XP as the first O/S on the first partition, the cloner also brought the original offset that XP created from way back during install - 32K. When you hard clone it also creates a different MFT (Master File Table) to accept the data copy, because no 2 drives have the exact same capacity, and especially if you scale partitions between dif size drives. Virtually all partitioning sw also defaulted to 32K offset when used, as did the often out of date disk manuf utilities (Seagate/WDC). This started changing towards the end of 2009 when Win 7 went RTM. Now some of the softwares offer "Win 7 or XP type" new disk partitioning, usually the 2010 or 2011 versions.
I never had ANY prob whatsoever with my drives concerning offsets. That is until the new manuf hard mapped 4096B sectored drives with the emulator chip (or chips) appeared. It is only now the offset becomes something to be aware of.
So my prob was, I wanted to clone my XP Win 7 dual/triple boot, but I wanted the AFT friendly 1024K offset now that I am going P67. But I couldnt change it without starting from scratch - remember i DO NOT IMAGE clone, only bit for bit. The cloner brings the MBR and part table and its copy AND the offset.
I thought then that I could try the PAT to change the offset without ruining my beautiful O/S. Being a bit wary - didnt want to lose hundreds of hours of tweaking, I tried it on a Samsung 2TB F4 4096B drive that had the clone of my master drive. The samsung clone had the 32K offset, 4 parts primary, XP 64 and Win 7 X64, and if I lost it - no prob, just a clone.
So heres the 2TB Samsung clone (one of many) of my "master" dual boot HDD hooked up also to PC with master drive and booting to the master, ran it thru PAT and it said both could use aligning.
So then I unhooked my master HDD (didnt want to risk it) and just booted to the samsung, ran the tool, auto rebooted rehooked up the master drive and booted to it and checked out what happened
Then ran it thru diskpart to see what kinda offset I now have
Well, how about that, it made the offset 2048K or 2MB (2048K X 1024B per K)
This is good, made me very happy
Any multiple of 1024K is a winner, and 2048K is best for SSD drives
FWIW you are wasting your money unless you do a 2048K offset on these type drive. The SSD's have NO sectors only 4096 I/O pages.
You can also accomplish this manually with the Win 7 diskpart and the offfset sub command (offset=2048) when partitioning a new SSD. I assume Paragon does this to kill two birds with one stone, AFT and SSD. The only thing dif from a 1024K offset (align) is that you just have a bigger unallocated space at beginning of drive
Then I put the master drive back in with the samsung and tried the align on the master. That was a mistake.
Since I had great success with PAT I left the both drives in and booted to the master and let the tool to do its thing on my master drive - which had the 32K offset. PAT plugged away again and then after reboot everything showed green. Went into diskpart and looked at the offset
Even better, the PAT reconfigured the master drive to 1024K.
This old drive was NOT 4096B sectored - plain old 512B
Great!
Good to know the tool can even fix the 32K offset on "normal" drives - well worth it just for that - redo offset without any drastic reinstall.
But I always use killdisk in windows to see the unallocateds, because this is the only sw that I know can show these. Diskmanager doesnt show, nor does diskpart - its just plain unused space.
As it turns out the tool also gave the connected samsung a 2MB offset to ALL its partitions. (2MB = 2048K) I was wondering what the hell was taking so long.
The samsung did not have these before, I checked.
Recalling I ran the tool on the solo Samsung in Win 7, and on the master in XP with Samsung still in PC. PAT seemed to want to protect align every partition on the second drive, and I did not ask it to do the samsung - it was fine as is. So I learned something. Never use the tool with more than one drive connected, and always use Win 7 if avail.
Now I had a new problem - how to get Samsung back to one offset only. Note that these extra offsets mean nothing - everything still runs fine, but I didnt like it. So I just cloned a dif HDD - a 1TB master I had back to the Samsung. The cloner sees the extra three 2MB offsets as just empty avail space and sucks them up. Worked just fine, tho I was back to 1024K.
Are we having fun yet?
New item:
Just stumbled onto a fantastic utility from Samsung - the ES Tool - via PM
You can set virtually every parameter you can think of on these drives, or do all types of maintenance.
The poor guy had a bad firmware flash and lost half the capacity of his 2TB AFT drive. But he brought it back with the tool
Woah!
Now why doesnt every HDD manuf have something like this??
http://www.samsung.com/global/busine...s/ES_Tool.html
And heres also the very specialized WDC align tool (acronis) for you XP guys
http://support.wdc.com/product/downloadsw.asp?sid=122
I might add that large (>2.19TB) native 4096B HDD (no emulation) are supposedly arriving mid 2011 (yeah right), coinciding with the P67 chipset bios - which are all EFI compliant. Not generally known is the EFI bios also runs MBRDos partitioning just fine. Once again how you partition determines what part of bios code is employed. Also Win 7 is fully able to read 4096B sectors. What I DONT understand is how they will get around the application problem - they are all written to interact with 512B sectoring.
When and if these native 4096B drives come out, all this aligning crap goes out the window. The new drives will obviously be >2.19TB, there is no reason to make them smaller, and WILL be used with Win 7 X64 with SP1 and EFI GPT and the new Intel SATA chipset drivers and the newly written software. So, starting now, you should no longer be using Win 7 32 bit - its a dinosaur.
From page 4-1 (top) in ASUS P8P67 Deluxe mobo manual:
This motherboard supports (Windows XP/XP 64bit / Windows Vista / Vista 64bit / Windows 7 / Windows 7 64bit)
Win XP X86 does not support EFI - no way Jose'
Neither does Win 7 X86 for booting.
Therefore if P67 Asus does Win XP, it does DOS MBR partitioning.
Simple.
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Decided to buy one of the new Hitatchi 3TB drives (newegg) $200
These are 64MB cache 7200RPM non green and appear to be non AFT drives. Suposedly very fast. Since i now have my EFI ASUS P67, this should be no prob. We shall see.
Along the same lines, I went to the Hitatchi site and found this PDF on big drives and UEFI. This is absolutely THE BEST ever, easy to understand document on this subject. Must read. They also admit that they apparently use long LBA. But I dont want long LBA, I know how to load a 3TB drive in a P67 mobo and make it happen. After a lot of digging and experimenting, I have totally figured out how to make the bootable Win 7 X64 3TB GPT disk - all in Diskpart.
I will post the commands here just for you few people keeping an eye on this
thread, after I do a lot more testing that is.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-472-_-Product
http://www.hitachigst.com/internal-drives/desktop/deskstar/deskstar-7k3000
http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/tech...002600FC/$file/FinalHiCap_2.2TB_TechBrief.pdf
But then every manuf throws in their own little trick stuff which just makes it that much harder to get a handle on the tech. Sheesh.
If you want to see what a real true EFI GPT HDD config looks like, here you go. AHCI Win 7 X64 latest Intel chip drivers, low level cleaned disk with no MBR remnants. Could have made as many primaries as I wanted.
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The new EaseUS partitioning sw came out today - vers 7.01
Third party sw vendors are finally addressing the fact GPT is now here in full bloom. But what they have done really tees me off. In their site blurb they have the following:
So on the site it says they now have "support" for 2-4TB drives.
What the hell is up with that???
Full EFI GPT has no 4TB limit, I can have ten 3TB drives, or fifty 4TB drives or one 50TB drive with 25 2TB partitions.if and when they come out. What this can only mean is Long LBA. They are gonna dribble this stuff out bit by bit to accomodate whatever drives are avail at the moment. So it appears that as of this minute anyway, either Win 7 diskpart in cmd line, or diskpart during install is the only utility that can correctly and fully implement EFI GPT to Intel specifications.
And as always, this means
AHCI/RAID only
Win 7 X64 SP1 only
Latest Intel vers 10 RST drivers
Latest Intel Chipset drivers
HDD that has been wiped (not formatted) and has no remnant MBR stuff anywhere on the drive.
I mean why have the damn EFI if not to use it correctly?
It should say "supports drive configurations up to 7 zettabytes"
