- Jun 30, 2004
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I don't know when WD and the HDD industry started releasing AF disks.
My workstations all have less than 1TB of local storage in drive sizes ranging from a 128GB SATA-III SSD to an accelerated (ISRT) SATA-III VelociRaptor running off an SATA-II port of a controller with 2x SATA-III and 4x SATA-II. When I installed the OS (in 2011) for this latter case with Windows 7-64, the AF patch to Win 7 was installed afterwards. I can't remember -- never even investigated -- whether this 600 GB VR drive was "AF" or otherwise. I can only say that I don't think I've had any problems with the drive or its configuration.
When, and with which SATA spec and drives, did the AF feature begin shipping?
Looking into the issue of MBR versus GPT, I find that only UEFI systems will make bootable GPT partitions. I have a server system with WHS [based on Win 2008 R2]. The AF patch was installed early in the OS update. The server has four 1TB drives -- one SATA-II and three SATA-III. Of course, these are all formatted as MBR partitions.
It appears that it doesn't matter whether one uses MBR or GPT for any drives of <= 2.2TB capacity -- for performance or any other reason.
I have just obtained two 2TB Seagate NAS drives. I see in customer reviews that the Seagate NAS fares just a bit better than the WD Reds, but this is "customer perception" driven by any number of things. I've had the suspicion that some of the problems people may have had with the larger capacity drives might have derived for users who were insufficiently informed about either AF or GPT. Maybe they never installed the AF patch to their systems. I want to assure that these new Seagate drives operate reliably and get installed correctly.
The AF "patch" for Win 7 and WHS-2011 is an emulation program which makes the 4096-byte sectors appear as eight 512-byte sectors. But the OS provides an option beyond the "default" (512) to create 4096-byte sectors. Under this scenario, does choosing the sector-size at format-time even matter? Should I choose 4,096 as a sector size? What are the efficiency and reliability considerations?
These two new drives will be run off an SATA-III (PCI_E) controller that should (according to its manual and specs) provide the full AHCI as well as various RAID mode standards.
ANOTHER QUESTION: I just checked the specs on my 600 GB VelociRaptor boot-system disk. It is an AF drive. But when I installed Windows 7 in 2011, I simply allowed Windows to prepare the disk, and the AF patch was added to Windows later. What should I do to assure that this VR disk is properly aligned and working properly? It is currently accelerated with a 60GB SSD with ISRT. If the disk was not properly partitioned and formatted in the beginning, how can I correct this without having to reinstall the OS from scratch? (and how would I do that, if the AF functionality patch is an update to Windows 7?)
My workstations all have less than 1TB of local storage in drive sizes ranging from a 128GB SATA-III SSD to an accelerated (ISRT) SATA-III VelociRaptor running off an SATA-II port of a controller with 2x SATA-III and 4x SATA-II. When I installed the OS (in 2011) for this latter case with Windows 7-64, the AF patch to Win 7 was installed afterwards. I can't remember -- never even investigated -- whether this 600 GB VR drive was "AF" or otherwise. I can only say that I don't think I've had any problems with the drive or its configuration.
When, and with which SATA spec and drives, did the AF feature begin shipping?
Looking into the issue of MBR versus GPT, I find that only UEFI systems will make bootable GPT partitions. I have a server system with WHS [based on Win 2008 R2]. The AF patch was installed early in the OS update. The server has four 1TB drives -- one SATA-II and three SATA-III. Of course, these are all formatted as MBR partitions.
It appears that it doesn't matter whether one uses MBR or GPT for any drives of <= 2.2TB capacity -- for performance or any other reason.
I have just obtained two 2TB Seagate NAS drives. I see in customer reviews that the Seagate NAS fares just a bit better than the WD Reds, but this is "customer perception" driven by any number of things. I've had the suspicion that some of the problems people may have had with the larger capacity drives might have derived for users who were insufficiently informed about either AF or GPT. Maybe they never installed the AF patch to their systems. I want to assure that these new Seagate drives operate reliably and get installed correctly.
The AF "patch" for Win 7 and WHS-2011 is an emulation program which makes the 4096-byte sectors appear as eight 512-byte sectors. But the OS provides an option beyond the "default" (512) to create 4096-byte sectors. Under this scenario, does choosing the sector-size at format-time even matter? Should I choose 4,096 as a sector size? What are the efficiency and reliability considerations?
These two new drives will be run off an SATA-III (PCI_E) controller that should (according to its manual and specs) provide the full AHCI as well as various RAID mode standards.
ANOTHER QUESTION: I just checked the specs on my 600 GB VelociRaptor boot-system disk. It is an AF drive. But when I installed Windows 7 in 2011, I simply allowed Windows to prepare the disk, and the AF patch was added to Windows later. What should I do to assure that this VR disk is properly aligned and working properly? It is currently accelerated with a 60GB SSD with ISRT. If the disk was not properly partitioned and formatted in the beginning, how can I correct this without having to reinstall the OS from scratch? (and how would I do that, if the AF functionality patch is an update to Windows 7?)
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