Advance Format Hard Drives

[Apex]

Just a small question but which of the 2TB hdd's you stock are the advance format and are any the older gen ones ?

Am not sure currently if i could use one so would hate to spend the cash and not be able to.

[oolon]

When i checked the model numbers all of them are expect the server level ones.

[Apex]

This could prove a issue for me then, going to have to do some digging to see if i can actually use one of these

[Singh400]

If you buy the the WD EARS 2TB (like I just have) you can actually 'disable' this feature by using a jumper on pins 7 & 8.

[oolon]

That does not disable advanced format it offsets the start sector by one. Internally the drive has a 4k sector, however it is accessable using a 512 byte unit interface. Rather than reporting itself as a device with 4k sectors as this may not be understood by many OSes. The reason this is a problem is in the old days the boot sector of a partition was on the last sector of previous track. As filesystems group diskspace into larger units than just one 512 byte sector, this can result in 2 4k sectors being written for every operation. The problem with the jumper solution is any OS that is 4k sector drive aware will then perform badly as it will be calculating sector starts incorrectly.