Windows 7 - External Advanced Format 4k sectors Hard Drive for Win 7, XP, Ubuntu

I need your advice!

I'm currently looking for a new external 3.5" hard drive to pair with external eSATA+USB enclosure, to use across Win 7, XP and Ubuntu. I borrowed from a friend and tested a new WD 1TB EARS green drive as single partition storage drive connected internally at Win 7 and XP, it is fast, cool and quite compare with my other 4 internal drives, performance seems on par with my 1 year old WD Black. However, I also saw bad comments about this new technology of advanced format 4k hard drive for XP and Ubuntu.

Now, I'm searching for a good external 3.5" eSATA+USB enclosure and very soon going to buy the WD EARS hard drive because I'm out of hard disk space for my data storage. I need at least another 1TB, but I'm afraid that I may have degraded performance for using across Win XP, Win 7 & Ubuntu.

All my current hard drives are WD, so far so good. WD is my choice for good warranty service.

Shall I get this EARS drive as external cross platform single partition storage? If I buy it, which partition tool to use to ensure that it will get optimum performance across all abovementioned platforms?

Why not get the 1TB EADS without the advanced formatting and save yourself some headaches?

Thanks for your suggestion, I knew it and I just want to get prepared and face it.

I already have 2 units of 1TB EADS in my desktop, they are slightly slower than 1TB EARS, probably due to older firmware, but this is not important. I heard EARS may replace EADS soon, and eventually all other hard drive manufacturers may use 4k advanced format, so that's why I ask.

One of the major reason I'm still keeping XP is my Win 7 cannot beat my XP in massive file transfer.

If you just have 1 partition, then you can jumper the drive to make it look like 512 byte sectors - I wouldn't advise that. You will have to run a western digital tool to align the partitions on 4096 byte boundaries for XP to access them I believe. If you create the partitions with Windows 7, perhaps they will already be 4096 byte aligned. I don't know about Ubuntu.

If you are looking to the future you should replace that XP box with a Windows 7 box, even though I am sure you have good reason to keep it now.

- Gene

Woah...you have 2TB now...and expect within a year that you will increase to over 1000TB???? What in the world are you doing?

oops, sorry, my big mistake, I mis-estimated it, edited to prevent further confusion.

Currently 2x 1TB WD Green, 1x 1TB Black + 1x 320G WD Blue in the XP box, I'm HD movie fan.

I google and found that the jumper cannot be used for external cross platform.

Yes, single partition it in Win 7 and use in XP no problem. From further study, now i think Ubuntu should have no problem in partition the drive, I just have to buy 1 and test it out.

Is there any Bootable CD partition tool (like UBCD4Win in USB/CD) that can do the same result like Win 7 to 4k aligned single partition drive? Is there an bootable CD tool that can check if a drive is 4k aligned?