Advanced Format refers to hard drives that use sector sizes of greater than 512 bytes. Most AF drives use 4096 byte sectors.
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Bitlocker won't initialize on a 4TB drive with 4K sectors
I'm trying to enable BitLocker on a 4TB drive with 4K physical sectors (Advanced Format) on a 64-bit Windows 7 box with SP1.
The drive is partitioned GPT (1 partition) and formatted with NTFS.
...
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1answer
83 views
Hard Drive Advance Format 512e Compatibility with 4K Native OS
I would like to understand the compatibility of the Advance Format drives with existing OS's, particularly if the Hard Drive has 512 emulation (AF 512e).
I understand the basics of how the 512 ...
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2answers
185 views
Partitioning Options for Advanced Format drive
I bought two 2TB advanced format drives.
One of them is a 2TB WD Caviar Green WD20EARX, the other is a 2TB Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001.
I have the following questions:
What is the best partition ...
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2answers
288 views
Windows 7, raid 1 with advanced format drive
I had a nice software raid 1 (using windows 7 raid) working when one of my drives failed.
I replaced it by another one (WD blue 1 TB) which uses 4k sectors, and this makes windows unhappy (Cannot ...
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0answers
210 views
What is my miniport's service name?
i am trying to query the physical sector size of my drive using fsutil:
C:\Windows\system32>fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo c:
NTFS Volume Serial Number : 0x78cc11b2cc116c1e
Version : ...
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1answer
433 views
Partition table independent of sector size
The plot
I have a WD10JPVT 1Tb disk inside an IcyBox IB-290StUS-B USB/esata enclosure.
When I connect the disk via USB, I get a 512 logical / 512 physical sector size.
When I connect the disk via ...
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2answers
113 views
Is it safe to overwrite LBA 2-2047
So back when I used WUBI before settling on using a VM, GRUB was installed (but I messed it up and had to reinstall everything (luckily I backed up)). That was back when I used Vista which starts at ...
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1answer
937 views
Is it possible to set the logical sector size of a USB HDD?
I have two supposedly identical 3TB Western Digital USB HDDs. One contains nearly the full 3TB of data. I want the other to be a backup of that data. There are lots of small files, so running cp would ...
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0answers
447 views
MacOSX: Truecrypt partition on HDDs with larger sector size than 512 bytes
I have an external USB 3.0 HDD which uses a sector size larger than 512 bytes (4kB). In Linux, I created a truecrypt encrypted partition on it, which works fine on any Linux or Windows Computer. ...
4
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1answer
1k views
How would I force Debian to use the physical sector size on a hard disk?
I just purchased a few new 3TB WD drives. These have physical 4k sectors, but there is some sort of layer which is providing 512B logical sectors (see the partition table below).
In order to attempt ...
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1answer
496 views
Getting advanced format drives to like new?
I have 5 2TB WD Green (WD20EARX) drives that I eventually want to put into software RAID 5. I can't seem to find a complete guide on getting these drives prepared for use with Ubuntu (mdadm) that ...
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2answers
514 views
logical sector size changes depending on whether it is attached via USB or direct SATA
I have a 3TB WD disk (in a My Book Essential external drive.) I used parted under Linux to partition it with a GPT disklabel and loaded it up with data from my laptop through the USB cable. Then I ...
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1answer
173 views
Migrate Win7 upgrade from 63 sector to 4096 sector advanced format disk
If I use the Windows 7 backup on a system that has the 63 sector starting location and restore it to an advanced format 4096 sector system, will the restore create the starting sector at 63 or 4096?
3
votes
1answer
3k views
Advanced format partition alignment
I cloned a non Advanced Format drive (W7 64bit) to a new hard drive (Seagate) that was AF, the software I used supposedly does not support 4k very well (Todo Backup Free 3.5).
1.) Is there a Windows ...
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2answers
425 views
Why is my magnetic hard drive exceedingly slow?
Writes to my WD Caviar Green 2TB hard drive are exceedingly slow. When dpkg is setting up packages atop reports speeds of between 0.5 and 1 MB/s. AHCI is enabled in my bios. I bought the drive new. ...
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2answers
560 views
How do I test to see if all writes to my hard drive are aligned to its 4k sectors?
I'm using Linux with 4 hard drives that use 4k sectors. There are several layers between my filesystem and the raw devices: Disks > Linux Raid 5 > dm-crypt > LVM.
Every resource I have found has ...
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1answer
2k views
Performance of RAID 5 with mdadm
I have set up a software-raid 5 with mdadm on a 1.3 GHz AMD Neo 36L dual core machine using 3 1.5 TB Seagate Barracude Green drives (4k sectors). The chunk size of the raid is 512 KB. On top of the ...
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2answers
339 views
Are there partition recovery software available that support 4k sector drives?
I have several 2TB Western Digital EARS hard drives in my WHS 2011 server that suddenly became "not initialized".
I'm currently trying TestDisk, but after one quick analyze I get the following ...
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3answers
2k views
How to Clone Win7 from 512b sectors to 4096b sectors
I'm using a new Thinkpad and I'm trying to upgrade the drive from a 250GB to a 640GB. I grabbed a WD Scorpio Blue and a ByteCC USB/SATA adapter.
First I tried booting Linux and doing a dd ...
6
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2answers
4k views
Is my OCZ SSD aligned correctly?
I have an OCZ Agility 2 SSD with 40 GB of space. I use it as a system drive in Debian Linux ("Squeeze") and in my opinion it's really fast. I've read a lot on aligning partitions and file systems, and ...
4
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1answer
275 views
Are 4k sectors more efficient for hard disk data transfer?
I have just obtained two hard drives which use 4k sectors, but report their physical sector size to the OS as only 512 bytes.
Does this mean that the OS must send eight requests to the drive to read ...
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2answers
4k views
Filesystem config for 4k sector drive that reports 512 byte sectors [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Western Digital Green drive from 512 byte sectors (jumpered) to 4k byte sectors (removal of jumper)
I have just purchased two Western Digital WD20EARS disks and ...
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3answers
1k views
Can Windows XP be installed on a partition that starts at sector 64 (on Advanced Format 4k drives)?
I could manually create 4k aligned partition (with linux tools, eg. live cd), that would start at LBA sector 64 (not at sector 63 as default in Windows XP installer). I do not remember, but I guess ...
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2answers
787 views
Does the advanced format tool bundled by manufacturers actually do anything which mkntfs doesn't?
I recently bought a new drive (specifically, a 2TB Samsung Spinpoint) that says on the label that it supports advanced format, and that I should download the tool from their site.
Unless I'm missing ...
