I'm considering getting a pair of WD15EADS drives (1.5TB GP/32MB cache), for a gmirror.
There's also the WD15EARS, which has 64MB cache (Which is near-useless AFAIK) and so called "Advanced format", which seems to be some sort of marketing speak for a 4K sector size.
Is there any advantage for a 4K sector size instead of the default 512 bytes? I know about the disk alignment (Start at 64, not 63), but is there are real world benefit or drawback?
(It's also 15 euro's more expensive)
Most importantly however, the WD site mentions:
Quote:
This firmware modifies the behavior of the drive to wait longer before positioning the heads in their park position and turning off unnecessary electronics. This utility is designed to upgrade the firmware of the following hard drives: WD1000FYPS-01ZKB0, WD7500AYPS-01ZKB0, WD7501AYPS-01ZKB0.
CAUTION: Do not attempt to run this software on any hard drives other than what is listed above.
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It's not entirely clear to me if this utility only works for listed models or for all GP drives (including the WD15EADS/EARS drives)?