Western Digital's Advanced Format, 4k sectors, and you - what you need to know

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http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3691&p=1

From a numbers perspective, Western Digital estimates that the use of 4K sectors will give them an immediate 7%-11% increase in format efficiency. ECC burst error correction stands to improve by 50%, and the overall error rate capability improves by 2 orders of magnitude. In theory these reliability benefits should immediately apply to all 4K sector drives (making the Advanced Format drives more reliable than regular drives), but Western Digital is not pushing that idea at this time.
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  • Note: Windows Vista, 2008, 7 will support the 4k sectors. Earlier versions of Windows don't play nice without some workarounds, and even then, there's a performance hit.
  • WD has two workarounds for installing operating systems using images. The first uses an offset and works as long as only a single partition is used on the drive. This must be done at the initial partitioning of the drive.
  • The second method is to use the WD Align tool to move misaligned partitions to an aligned position, this works even on drives with multiple partitions.
  • Bottom line: Big impact to imaging software and there's a risk of misaligned partitions without special procedures, especially on pre-Vista versions of Windows.
  • The Advanced Format drives are coming any day now, with 500GB platters. They all have 64MB of cache and they are identified by the suffix EARS (i.e. WD10EARS for a 1TB drive).
 
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