Western Digital Advanced Format Freezing

I bought a Western Digital 1.5T drive from newegg. With it being a 32MB cache drive I never expected it to support advanced format (officially only the high end 64MB cache drives support advanced format), but lo and behold it arrives with the advanced format configuration table. (Not actual drive pictured)
http://www.filedump.net/dumped/wd10ears1278720119.jpg

I didn't give the advanced format setting another thought. I simply slapped the drive into my (Windows XP) system and set to filling it up with my backup data. Then I notice that as its writing the data my system freezes randomly. I googled advanced format and freezing only to find it is a common problem. I decided to do a through test on the drive as I try to solve the freezing problem. These are my results. All benchmarks were ran three times to root out inconsistencies.


First I tested the drive with no 7-8 jumper and no alignment what-so ever (not using WD Align). I Quickly discovered major issue. Write speeds were terrible!
http://www.filedump.net/dumped/b41278719723.jpg


I then tested it with the 7-8 jumper only, with no alignment (not using WD Align). Write speeds improved dramatically, but the freezing continued.
http://www.filedump.net/dumped/jumper1278719727.jpg


Only when I removed the jumper and used only the WD align utility did the freezing stop. This resulted in a slight improvement in read speeds and a slight drop in write speeds.
http://www.filedump.net/dumped/software1278719731.jpg


In conclusion I recommend using ONLY the WD align utility and never using the 7-8 jumper and never running an advanced format drive unaligned. I have also noticed the freezing problem in windows 7 using the drive as an external. (needs further investigation) It should be noted that there was no increase in storage capacity (aside from ~1MB) and no tangible boost in speed. (15MB/s write is unacceptable, and is surely due to a formatting error)

 

It's worth having a look at WD's Knowledge Base and Community Support forums concerning the installation of a WD Advanced Format drive. You'll find both here.The poor performance of an unaligned drive on WinXP is well documented there, and is apparently expected by WD. It apparently has to do with the fact that WinXP reads and writes 512-byte sectors, while the Advanced Format wants to use 4KB sectors. The aligning of the drive seems to have to do with lining up the sector boundaries so that they fall in the right places on the drive.

 

Yes, but the underlying point is the "XP single partition" jumper does not work or at least is in some way causing freezing. A lot of users could use the jumper and assume everything is all right, all the while there system is freezing randomly. The 7-8 jumper is designed to solve the alignment problem in hardware. It might solve the alignment problem and restore write speeds to normal, but seems to cure one problem at the price of another. All I know is it causes random freezes that render a system all but unusable in XP. Don't get me wrong, I'm not dogging WD, they make great drives. In fact all of my drives are WD. It just seems being the leader into 4K is taking its toll on them. The transition to 4K was never expected to be a perfectly smooth one after all.

 

Western Digital Advanced Format and RAID

I recently purchased two 2TB WD drives (western digital caviar Green WD20EARS 2TB 64MB cache drives to be exact) to put in a RAID 1. I benchmarked the drives in the same way as before in XP. It is interesting to note that the 7-8 jumper is preferable when using raid.

http://www.filedump.net/dumped/bench1304556811.jpg

 

Note to anyone:

If your popping these drives in computers that use XP use the Paragon or WD alignment tools and it'll save you a lot of hassles. I have the 2TB WD20EARS model. Saved myself a lot of headaches by using the align tools. I also flashed the drive to stop auto parking so fast. If you need to learn about that Google & Youtube the following:

WD20EARS WDIDLE3

These green drives park the read heads way too often which will eventually cause wear and tear much sooner from my understanding. You can leave them as is, but if your knowledgable in the area of flashing anything go ahead and do so. It's a quick process that should take 5 minutes tops after you've learned the right steps.