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Question about some WD research

A

AirPower4ever

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 20, 2009
Messages
131
I have 4 of these Western Digital Black 500GB ea. in RAID 5. Currently they only hold my movie library, but I wanted to find out if I should reformat the drive from the standard 512k format to the Advance 4K format? I only use large movie files on these drives and everything is backed up so I have the copies.

But I wondered about the 4K formatting. I went to Western Digital and I cannot find out if these drives can be done that way. If you guys suggest that I should, the next question is can the drives be done in 4K?

Does anyone else have these drives in a set up like what I have? Again, it's just a storage drive (D:/) and nothing else. Can you tell me if it is can be done and if it has worked well for you?

Thanks

Windows 7, 64-bit (C: drive)
Storage (D: drive) 4 x 500GB RAID 5 - WD5001AALS
 
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You can not format to advanced 4K formatting. You either have a drive that lies about the size of its 4K sectors and reports 512 byte instead or you have an older drive that actually has 512 byte sectors. If you have one of these drives that lie about their true sector size (called advanced format) you should partition them with Vista or above (or use an alignment program) to avoid slowness by being unaligned. For a raid array the chunk/stripe size will probably a multiple of 4K anyways so you most likely do not to have to worry about alignment.
 
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I was thinking that I would have to take each drive, format each to 4K, then put them back in to my system and then create a new RAID 5.

I actually found some 4K stuff at WD and they have a program that looks like you have to create a CD, boot to it and then select the drive to do the 4K. This stuff was buried and not easily found, I wish websites can just have this info links attached at the product level. Click on the product and then all your items associated about it is there. Much easier.

Thanks for your response and I was lagging on mine, had some roof work to do. I'll just leave it as is, thanks.
 
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