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Old 5th September 2010
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phoenix phoenix is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker View Post
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?
Skip all the WD "Advanced Format" drives. They're crap. They report a 512 KB physical sector size to the OS, even though they use a 4 KB physical sector size. This causes all kinds of performance issues for everything.

4 KB drives from other manufacturers correctly report the real physical sector size, so the OS/filesystem will work correctly.
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