Mind numbing confusion about 1TB VelociRaptor & Advanced Format

[Matt_Stevens]

Two questions, the first being real quick. I just received the two 1TB WD VelociRaptors (WD1000CHTZ) sold barely used, advertised with the remainder of the warranty.

I just want to make sure that I am correct in that the CHTZ is a "Bare drive" and was not sold by WD with the IcePack heat-sink. I have two 160GB rators that have the IcePacks and the stickers over one screw stating removal voids the warranty.

Second question... I am confused about this Advanced Format Hard Drive thing. The more I read about it, the more I am confused as to how to properly format.

Am I correct in thinking I need to install this to one of my Windows 7 PC's SATA ports, do a full format using NTFS and all the automatic settings AND that Windows 7 inherently knows what type of drive it is and formats it accordingly? This method reults in a proper format, yes?

Neither drive will be an OS drive. Both will end up as storage for video files used in non linear editing and I am likely to create a RAID 0 with the two for extra speed.

It is possible that the RAID will be handled externally via a USB3.0 case.

 

[razel]

Yes, use Win7+ to create the partition and you'll be fine. You don't need the 'full format.' What you want is Win7+ Disk Management to create the partition. It knows how to align. Once the partition is created then you format. You can reformat all day using other OSs and as long as it doesn't delete/create the partition you are golden.

The basic steps that I'd do. Plug it in. Get to command prompt. type diskpart

lis dis (make note of the disk #)
sel dis # (where # is the disk #)
lis dis (DOUBLE CHECK you have the right disk chosen)
cle (clean deletes all previous partition information)

Close out, then go to Disk Management and have fun.

 

[Mighty_Miro_WD]

Hi there.

This VelociRaptor model in particular doesn't come with a heat sink IcePack frame.

As for the AF, this is a technology that optimizes the data structure on the hard drive, including increasing the physical sector size from 512 bytes to a more efficient 4096 byte (4K) sector size. For more information you can take a look at this KB article:

http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=Atnw1o

And lastly, you can initialize the drives the standard way in Disk Management. Here's another article you can check with the steps how to make this:

http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=21KWhi

Hope this helps.

Cheers!

 

[AlienTech]

Advanced format means using 4K sectors.. Some programs wont work with it and you have to make sure you partition the drive so it dont cross sector boundaries. Crossing boundaries means losing more than 50% of performance in many areas.
I use a partition of alignment of 4096 sectors.. Thats a few megabytes wasted.. You could use like 1024 or 64 sectors etc.. This was such a huge problem that after trying all kinds of things I just said to heck with it as I wasted many days trying to fix this alignment problem. Windows itself when you install to a blank drive is supposed to properly align and set things. But I was not willing to reinstall it. Trying to align it after you have data on the drive means a very slow process of moving data around to realign the partition. Losing a few megabytes of drive space is not worth the hours and days trying to play with it.

This was originally an idea from seagate so they could use MBR with external drives upto 16TB capacity.. But they fumbled and could not even ship the initial drives properly aligned. I was getting under 80m/b speeds and considering this was a higher capacity drive of similar features I had in the desktop which got over 150MB and closer to 200MB, it felt darn slow and even locked up copying a lot of small files over to it until the fat got updated. This was one of the worst ideas out of the drive industry. If everyone had decided to do it and they did all similarly then maybe it would have worked out better. But imagine in a raid setup you have both types of drives, same model and capacity.. Yes same models comes in both formats.