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

[tongks]

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?

 

[GeneO]

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

 

[tongks]

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.

 

[GeneO]

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

 

[pparks1]

Thanks for your suggestion, I knew it and I just want to get prepared and face it, because I may hit total of 1PB storage by end of next year.

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

 

[tongks]

Thanks for your suggestion, I knew it and I just want to get prepared and face it, because I may hit total of 1PB storage by end of next year.

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.

 

[tongks]

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.
- Gene

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?