Advanced format drives! Whatever next?

[Loose rivets]

My WD 1TB RED drive turned up from ebuyer on the third day despite free delivery. Packaging was cursury. I assume drives are tougher these days and park the heads - I hope.

On the static bag there's a warning that Advanced Format Drives need special attention. They don't accentually say this is one, so more time lost starting at square one.

On the issue of not always being able to shrink the first partition down to the size I want, is there a better method to get the exact C drive size required?

[Guest 112233]

Just by coincidence I've bought a 3TB Toshiba P300 Red HDD. What System are you planning to install it in ? Details please.

This type of drive may also be affected in the same way as your reference to "Special handling. Purchased from EBay too.

Mine is a 3.5" Model and I've installed it in my "Ubuntu 14.04" PC that I use for long term storage. I have used the Linus "disk" utility to short format the drive with an Ext4 file system, without any problems so far. The formatted capacity of the single partition is bit over 3 TB, and Ext4 gets over the file size limitations of the older Ext3/Ext2 systems.

Through put rates are average Read rate:156.0 MB/s and an average write of 147.5 MB/s - 15.64 Millisec seek time. (100 MB file sizes) - Actual performance seems quicker. The motherboard is a SATA 1and I'm using traditional SATA Cables. The drive can perform a lot quicker. supporting SATA 6 interfaces.

Generally Modern Hard drives are in effect their own Self-contained sub systems. Its a "Red" so its supposed to really be in a "NAT" system - i.e. continuous operation with the minimum of start/stop cycles. I have seen a few queries regarding WD 3TB Red Drive(s) not being seen by the system Bios in Apple computers ? - I checked the BIOS Drive listing before powering up the PC - It was there no probs. Advanced Format refers to HD's with Sectors spanning greater that 512/528 Bytes per track.

Temperature: Normal use Temps hover at about 32/35 Degrees C. (The PC is a dual core Banger !)

The Wiki is here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format

CAT III


The packaging although Cardboard is quite substantial in case it needs to be returned.

[Loose rivets]

Oh. In a word, B:mad:ah! I was looking forward to playing with this tonight.

I did rather act on impulse, making the assumption I was buying an industrial strength but ordinary hard drive. Now I see I can't revert to W7, and even my willingness to throw away long bits of wasted sectors is going to bite (ho ho) me in the jacksie, as it seems it needs to track those wasted surfaces with some kind of read/write with a huge overhead in performance.

All in all, it's just not what I wanted though I'd be happy to still use the SSD at the front end and keep this for storage - if that would make reasonable use of it.

The planned system? Well, I was going to build an up to date PC probably based on the i5 and I did imagine I'd try removing my SSD boot drive and seeing how well this new drive would carry the OS - partitioned into 3 logical drives. Not very well it seems and also, W8 is the first OS allowed, and I wanted at least the option of going back to W7

Just for now I was going to leave the first partition free and use the other two to replace an entirely inappropriate 2.5" drive that's worked its poor butt off for 5 years. Although backed up, I have thousands of photos on it and was looking forward to a safer place on the PC to store them.

But anyway, it's clear it's not what I was looking for.

What should I have aimed at? Fast. No rules about the OS used, and above all, industrial strength.

Also, it seems to imply it can be reformatted for other use, though this would have to be a low-level format and I'm not at all sure about changing the fundamental use of a design.

[Guest 112233]

Rivits:

"I did rather act on impulse, making the assumption I was buying an industrial strength but ordinary hard drive. Now I see I can't revert to W7, and even my willingness to throw away long bits of wasted sectors is going to bite (ho ho) me in the jacksie, as it seems it needs to track those wasted surfaces with some kind of read/write with a huge overhead in performance."

Yes I wondered about this - Re the Figs I gave ! - Its a function of the magneto/Hysteresis characteristics of the drive technology ! - This is a technical topic in its own right.

The example that I have used is a real old banger ! - The primary drive is a Barracuda 2.5" 500GB HD that works well as a primary boot drive/work space, using a system of drive organisation/portioning called LVM - It provides for me a highly enhanced read/write performance. on the Barracuda.

But and its a "Big Butt" its a pig to replicate as a system volume image.

I have produced as a fall back: A Ubuntu 14.04 boot disk and a Lubuntu System repair disk (used in anger) to manually assign boot partition status as needed to LVM volumes. (Complex but I accidentally screwed up)

I copy al my essential Work to the "RED" in a structured way - Performance wise it took 20 Mins to copy back to the Barracuda 168 GB of data this afternoon - Using Gparted to check the integrity of the RED drive file system - re physical/logical sector mapping. All was OK

All was fine of course - Having some "Big Wellies" in disk terms is although; a bit old-fashioned in technical terms, very useful for a Single PC.

Stay with the "RED" it might come in useful Rivits. Its a behavioural thing re the intellectual value of the data being archived and the characteristics of the mods to your operating environment that you are preserving. (To hell with W10). - I use dropbox very successfully , but for all sorts of reasons I need to keep copies within my own physical domain.


CAT III

[Loose rivets]

I went back to ebuyer this evening, and it's obvious I swapped from one read-in to another on the point of purchase. I recall I was having problems with that dumb Barclaycard final security box that undid the entire purchase. When I went back, I successfully purchased . . . another drive. :ugh:

It's not worth the footle of sending it back, so I'll just have to find a place for it. I've no need for a network drive - my last one, a Black Armour - packed up just as we were selling up in Texas. Fantastic timing, since my main PC's HD didn't survive the Dallas security. It would have been better off as hold baggage since it's thought they don't like the magnetism from the scanners' belt motors. Yes, backups 3 and 4 saved the day.

So, the SSD stays and the RED holds my chaotic mass of photos etc.

I was going to use that first 1/3rd during the transition to a new W7. (64bit this time.) so it is a bit of a disappointment from that point of view. If I change my mind again, and go for a new HD, what's a good, fast, reliable, 1 TB HD that fits that bill? When asking this question some years ago, the industrial quality units with good write-ups were 5 times the price.