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Motorola Droid Bionic - A Quick Previewby Brian Klug on 9/12/2011 4:35 AM EST
- Posted in
- Droid
- Smartphones
- Motorola
- Android
- Mobile
- motorola droid bionic
63 Comments
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lpjazzman220 - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkmy only real question(or concern that is) is, will all that extra heat be detrimental to the device over time? my laptop doesnt even get that hot while under full load running a game with my radeon mobility 5850. I hope they figure out a way to get these devices to run cooling fairly soon, especially since i know they are only going to try to make them stronger. how ridiculous would it be if they started putting cooling fans in smartphones? Reply
chinedooo - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linki highly doubt that. Notice he said 112 farenheit not celcius. Thats like 44 C which is what your m15x i presume should be geting at idle. If you get 44 c at full load you must have some liquid colling attacehd to your laptop, lol. Reply
corymcnutt - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - linkI'm sorry, but I don't believe the heat is happening to everybody...I have an extended battery in mine and neither the screen nor the battery gets even warm to me. Reply
Ben90 - Friday, September 16, 2011 - linkCheck out the lady at around 30 seconds pulling a cart with her powerchair lol. Reply
bullwinkle - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - linklmao !!
you and people like you keep the Internet alive .. Reply
Omega215D - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkIt wasn't a good sign that this phone was constantly delayed and then getting average scores in the reviews. Hopefully your in depth review will shed some light on the phones strengths and weaknesses along with any firmware updates that come along.
I like the current design of the Bionic. It has a nice industrial, yet professional look to it. Reply
ImSpartacus - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkThis phone was only hyped because all of Verizon's other LTE phones are terrible. It's unfortunately that it isn't better. Reply
Omega215D - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkI have the Thunderbolt and it is far from terrible. The Bionic was hyped because of LTE paired with dual core and shipping with 2.3.4 Reply
ImSpartacus - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkI'm happy that you're satisfied with the Thunderbolt, but I've heard horror stories about its battery life. I can't say that I have used one, so maybe it is an acceptable phone. Reply
FITCamaro - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkI have a Thunderbolt as well. With a battery saving app that turns off the antennas when you're not using the device you easily get a full day of battery life. Extended usage throughout the day though and it'll die before you get home.
Really until manufacturers begin to build the 4G chipset into the processor, the battery life hit from using it is going to be significant. We'll see how Apple fares with the iPhone 5 I guess. I would expect them to aggressively turn off the 4G antenna though when its not being using in the OS rather than relying on a 3rd party app to do it. Reply
DanNeely - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkHave the rumor mills changed their mind on a 4g iphone? They had been saying not until next year because the current base band chips sucked too much power. Reply
mcnabney - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkIt has been reported MANY times that iPhone 5 is a minor update and will not include 4G. It is just an iPad2 guts in an iPhone 4 body. Reply
Samus - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - linkDude, as much as I love HTC (the G1 being one of the most important smartphones in history) the Thunderbolt is underengineered, rushed to production garbage. I know not one but TWO people who have that phone and both have had to warranty it, one for random rebooting, another for the battery not recharging (turned out to be a bad battery, and possibly not 'broken in' properly...
But that is niether here nor there. The real disappointment with it, and all LTE phones for that matter, is the battery life. T-mobile is looking smarter and smarter every day with their push to HSPA+ 3.5G because of it offering excellent battery life, easy/low cost implementation and near-4G speed (in some cases, superior to 4G.)
Battery technology has not caught up to LTE. Multicast broadcast, SC-FDMA, shody aIPn implementation, and dynamic frequency hopping (across huge frequency ranges) are all ridiculous, unneccessary features for a mobile network device relying on BATTERY power. Reply
Omega215D - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkThe Samsung Galaxy Tab with LTE did well with battery life and newer LTE chips are either out in the wild or on the horizon.
The Thunderbolt also has a 3G chip that's not found in any other LTE phone. It does simultaneous voice and data on EVDO, even when LTE is not present. Reply
Omega215D - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkThere are horror stories on just about everything out there.
Constantly fetching emails, FB notices, streaming, etc. will use up a lot of power on any phone. I noticed that if I turned off non essential stuff and apps the phone lasted as long as my original Droid. With the new radio update the battery lasts longer.
I decided to be bold and used a CPU tuner to better manage processor speed which now gives me a phone that can go for 50+ hours on standby, 15 - 20 hours of moderate usage and the usual 7 - 10 heavy to extreme usage... unless I keep the max speed down to the iPhone 4's 800MHz instead of the stock 1GHz rating.
I did have an unruly app that kept pegging the processor, even when not in use. That's another thing to be mindful of. Reply
Synaesthesia - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkSeeing as it burns through that large battery in a matter of three hours, I'm not surprised that it gets hot. All that power has to go somewhere. Reply
j_wadzii - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkI'm wondering if you got a bad battery..
My bionic doesn't get anything past what I would consider warm (my old phone was a OG Droid OC'd from 550 to 1100mhz.. that thing got HOT) and with pretty heavy use I'm getting around 10-12 hours of battery life. From what I can tell this is pretty consistent with other users. I had a tbolt for about a week and it would be dead in about 6 hours. Reply
dagamer34 - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkI think it's pretty obvious now why Apple is staying far away from LTE chips. No one cares how fast your download speed is if your phone dies in 3 hours. Reply
quentin- - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkHe was tethering the entire time over lte...if his reception was good during the entire test, he'd hit his bandwidth cap before the phone got below 50%. As far as I am concerned, lte gives alot more bang for your battery with speeds that vary from 5-40x faster than 3G on any carrier.
And this phone does get hot, but it's mostly due to the lte I've found. The only reason why the display feels hotter is because the battery/camera takes up the entire backside, with the CPU/lte and other heater producers underneath them.
Really wish someone other than Samsung could produce a decent SoC. It's clear from the benchmarks and the SGSII review that they are smoking the competition in this area (among others). The Prime will probably turn the entire market on its ass. Reply
eallan - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkLots of us want LTE phones, which is probably why they're selling. Reply
mcnabney - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkYou will only kill the battery in 3 hours if:
Have CDMA and LTE radios running
Are running the SoC actively
Have the screen on and set to highest brightness
Dimming a screen a bit and using the radio-selection app to deactivate the LTE radio until needed will probably get you an additional hour.
As for me, I don't think I have ever used my Droid for four solid hours in a day....ever. I have this thing called a job and a life so I can't just sit and play on my phone for 25% of the time I spend awake in a day. Reply
steven75 - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkMost of us have these things called "weekends" where we may be away from a charger for a significant amount of time, sometimes even a full day. Reply
MilwaukeeMike - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - linkCan't you buy an extended battery? I have one for my EVO 4G and it's great. I don't mind the extra size on my phone (although I'm sure many would). I'd much rather have a fast phone than a thin one. I think it's easier to hold and use with the fat battery anyway.
If my sprint contract were up soon I'd pick up one of these and switch to verizon in a sec for those LTE speeds. Reply
ecuador - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkWe appreciate all these Android phone reviews, but can't you guys get your hands on a Nokia N9? For example you have sort of convinced me I should get a Galaxy S2 if I get an Android phone, but should I perhaps wait for the N9 if it delivers its MeeGo promises? Reply
LoneWolf15 - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkFTA:
"To start, the Bionic as it is now is nothing like the Bionic we were originally shown at CES. That's because the current Bionic is really a Targa, but that's besides the point. "
Wasn't the original proposed BIonic based on an nVidia Tegra (not Targa), and the current production version is a TI OMAP?
Just asking for clarification, as the preview seems a bit confused and I wouldn't want others to be as well. Reply
eallan - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkTarga was the code name for the device. The bionic's (CES version) was called the "etna." The Etna had a tegra 2 SoC like the Atrix.
This new version is the Targa, with a Ti SoC. Confusing choice on the targa moniker i'd say. Reply
Brian Klug - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkThe "Bionic" now is a rebranded Codename Targa. There are a ton of references to it inside the actual software.
-Brian Reply
andy2na - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkwill this preview be the last we hear of the Bionic - just like the atrix? Given preview, promised updated review, but never released... Reply
Brian Klug - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkI will be very careful to avoid that situation, no, the Bionic will absolutely have its own large form review :)
-Brian Reply
Gris - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkOn the subject of battery life, I wonder if the batteries are pre-conditioned prior to testing. Li-ion batteries don't reach maximum capacity until they've gone through several charge/discharge cycles and unless all tested phones have a similar battery conditioning procedure prior to testing comparitaive results will be misleading. Reply
Hubb1e - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkThere is a well integrated high capacity 2700mAhr battery available for the phone. It makes the phone a bit thicker, but adds 1000mAhr. I've had mine since Thursday and can get through a whole work day with light use pretty easily. I have not installed any LTE controlling apps yet like some other commenters.
I took mine to the Giants game on saturday. I was able to browse the web for half the 1 hour ride and listened to pandora for 2 hours and the battery was registering 80% still. On the way home I did a test and streamed an episode of Archer on Netflix and the battery went from 70% to 40% during the 20min show. I was impressed though because the phone never dropped out and Archer streamed flawlessly even though we went through some tunnels. It was impressive. The phone only lasted a few more hours after that trip, but it did get me through the day.
I think I'm going to get the extended battery. Normal work days this battery is sufficient, but for trips I'd like to know I have some more freedom to actually use the phone during the day and not worry that I will run out of battery before I can contact my ride home. Reply
Brian Klug - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - linkI've never purchased an accessory for a review unit before, but I saw the extended battery was on sale this previous weekend and ordered one for the sake of reviewing it and seeing how that changes the battery life numbers.
I agree though that you basically need the extended battery for extended trips/time away from a charger with these LTE smartphones.
-Brian Reply
Mr Perfect - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkWow, 1080p30 video at 15.0 Mbps? That's a high enough bit/frame rate to actually look good, right? How would H.264 high profile compare to, say, other phones doing H.264 baseline with 1 reference frame? Reply
davolfman - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkWhy does almost nobody seem to note little ergonomic things like "With this model you can remove the SD card with the unit still on." Sure it's a little thing, but it's an ANNOYING little thing when you don't have that ability. This makes shooting pictures with a REAL camera that you send with the smartphone more practical for example. Reply
LoneWolf15 - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkAh, thank you for enlightening me. Much appreciated. =)
As cool of a device as it is, I think that waiting for the Samsung Droid (Nexus) Prime may be worth it for me. Reply
LoneWolf15 - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkEspecially as my Droid 2 just got Gingerbread, which has breathed new life into that phone. Just about everything has improved. Reply
synaesthetic - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - linkRoot it and put CM7 on it and you'll experience that same feeling all over again, only more so! Reply
TrackSmart - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkIf I recall, the Anandtech web browsing test loads a new website, pauses 20 seconds, then loads the next one. And no flash sites are included. My question is this: If the phone has a faster data connection and a faster processor for rendering pages, won't it have to load more web pages during the test?
I don't know if that would make a huge difference between various LTE equiped phones, but it might be a significant difference when comparing 3G CDMA phones to LTE.
Please correct me if I'm wrong in my recall of the web browsing test used by Anandtech. Reply
Brian Klug - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - linkInteresting point, you've got the test down correctly, though the number is a few dozen (I don't recall the actual number of pages). Some are heavy on images, some aren't. It's a combination of previous articles from the site, and there actually is a version with flash elements.
That's an interesting point too, in theory you'd load more pages, however the converse is that a device that loads the pages and then stops, gets into the idle state faster. This applies to both the baseband (eg you go from DCH->FACH->IDLE) and sit there more often, and the CPU also can also get idle quicker.
-Brian Reply
Helltech - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkI don't know much about cell phones at all, unfortunately. I still have an old LG EnV 2. Anyway looking at this article it seems the Samsung Galaxy S 2 is league and bounds better then the Bionic? Is that true? Or am I missing something? Reply
Nfarce - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkAnd love it for the most part. It's my first Verizon phone and my first Android having finally dumped AT&T and my iPhone 3. The issue of battery life in daily use for my needs is not an issue, but I can see where being away for a weekend would be a major concern, especially when surfing and using GPS. As others have said LTE eats it up. Fortunately, Verizon gave me $60 worth of free accessories including a car charger. I cannot imagine being away anywhere without at least a vehicle to charge it, let alone an AC outlet somewhere along the line. Even when camping in the woods I at least have an SUV nearby. Reply
SanX - Monday, September 12, 2011 - linkBut pity that Samsung beats it in many fronts. Worst parts are
1) its "penistile" monitor, It is very bright but of shitty resolution for the size
2) battery lifetime (LTE drains like there is no tomorrow not being faster then HSPA+, with WiFi it's also bad). How come it lags Sammy by the factor of 2 (TWO!!!!)
---------------------- conclusion ----------------------
Motorola CEO delivers barely enough for US products not to get out of business in a year or two. I do not know if he has any tech education, if not he must be ousted from the board immediately before Motorola became a new Palm and US an Asian colony. Reply
Nfarce - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link"1) its "penistile" monitor, It is very bright but of shitty resolution for the size"
Huh? What are you talking about SanX? While obviously the Galaxy S2 is a better phone, it only has 800x480 with a 4.27" display. The Bionic, like its recent 4.3" predecessor the X2, have 960x540 as this article references. Stop trolling and spreading FUD for those looking to get a new smartphone. Reply
s44 - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - linkIt has fewer subpixels than the S2. Reply
SanX - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - linkExactly. And not just that. Penistile red and blue subpixel resolutions are just 480x270 (!!!) 128 dpi !!! Go to the doctor if you can not see that.
Worse then in the first iPhone. Pixels are too visible, fonts look bad, you can not read small texts either, you permanently zoom the pages. The qHD green can not compensate its ugliness. Look at the picture above. All red, orange and yellow solid colors literally scream with each its huge pixel into your eyes.
Yes, Galaxy S2 is not perfect but at least they do not stink with pentile. The resolutions for large screens must be 1280x800 at least. No pentile. Reply
SanX - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - linkWow, i missed this is RGBW not RGBG pentile matrix. Even worse. All subpixels are at 480x270! Reply
TrackSmart - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - linkAssuming this article is correctly calculating the effective resolution of a pentile display (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/03/secret... then the addressable resolutions of the two screens are similar (~80% of what is advertised for the Bionic). That said, what your eye sees should still be appear to be somewhat higher resolution, particularly for images (as opposed to text).
I've been pleased enough with the pentile display on my Droid Incredible (older version of the technology), aside for daylight visibility. If I look hard, I can see some color fringing, etc, but I never think about it in normal use. That said, it seems a bit misleading to advertise the display resolution as QHD... Reply
MilwaukeeMike - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - linkHas anyone else seen the commercial for this phone? The first time I see someone with this phone I'm going to ask them if they had to kill two giant killer robots to get it. Reply
wpwoodjr - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - linkYes of course Reply
Brian Klug - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - linkIt's hilarious, I can't bring the phone up in conversation without a discussion about that commercial. What were they thinking?
-Brian Reply
wpwoodjr - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - linkThis phone is so smooth and fluid compared to my DX. It is a tad wider, wish it wasn't.
I've been running mostly in 3G mode so have been satisfied with battery life. Around Philly the Verizon 3G is fast enough that I don't really need 4G. I regularly get 1500kbs down.
The GPS is amazing - I have never had to wait more than 10 secs for it to kick in (outside) which is a big deal to me.
The camera is better than the DX, not as much noise reduction so you get more detail.
The pentile screen is fine, you can see a cross-hatch if you have really good eyesight or wear reading glasses, but its not a big deal. The greens are more saturated and better looking than on my DX.
I would like to get AnandTech's (Brian's) take on the number of bits used for color rendering. In the browser, I've noticed some banding on images with subtle background color changes. I think it may be using 16 bits/pixel rather than 24.
I dropped it from my lap in an SUV onto the asphalt and it's fine except for some scratches on the bezel.
It's an all-around fine device, especially if you like Moto / Verizon. Reply
HangFire - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - linkFirst of all, what ever happened to the Tbolt 4GB versus 8GB NAND issue?
Second, what s/w version of each phone was charted here? I ask because the Tbolt has improved markedly in battery life since the latest update. (I was able to verify that on a warranty replacement when I got to try it before & after again).
Third, while Tbolt battery life is nothing to crow about, I regularly get through an entire workday (including commuting) and come home with 40%, and have on occasion continued through the evening without another charge to end the day just getting into the red. I regularly check eMail and the occasional web page, use Tapatalk and News during lunch etc., not exactly heavy 'net usage but not making an effort to conserve battery power either. I still have checks and syncs set up but for reasonable intervals like hours not every few minutes (except eMail).
As for reliability, it gets down to getting a good one in the first place. Just like out family's two G1's and two G2's and 2 Droid Charge's to get to one good one each. My first Tbolt dynamically changed its own volume and my second had a display issue. Number 3 (still on warranty) has outlasted them both put together and has survived many a bump and drop. Nothing to crow about but when I see my friends and coworkers beaten and battered Motorolas and their catalog of issues I don't see them doing any better than HTC, if anything I don't consider them as sturdy in the long haul. In one respect I lucked out as an early adopter, as I got new replacement Tbolts each time, or maybe factory seconds, as the true refurbs from other consumers didn't have time to cycle through the system when I got mine.
In short the Thunderbolt is far from trash and far from having a useless battery life. After getting through the early life production issues and firmware update for better battery life, it is becoming a workhorse, and everyone wants to play with it, even while they echo the outdated and sometimes misinformed criticism. Reply
Jrouss - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - linkThough I would argue you should not have to do this to a new phone to make it useful, I ordered the extended battery for 24.99. It is a drastic improvement over the original battery. Reply
TrackSmart - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - linkI agree that the faster processor will get to idle state sooner, but it will still have a greater workload to perform over the course of the battery test.
You can test to see if this matters at all. See how many pages-per-hour a slower 3G phone loads during the test. Have a fast LTE phone load pages at a similar rate. If the battery life of the LTE phone is significantly longer in that test compared to the normal Anandtech test (e.g. 15-20% longer), it will be evident.
The current test is still reasonable for comparing phones in the same performance category and on the same network. Reply
wpwoodjr - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - linkBrian, I hope you will post battery life figures for 3G as well as 4G. It would give a much better picture of how the phone stacks up to other non-4G phones, especially as I don't personally really see the need for 4G speed on my phone so I've been running it in 3G mode.
All around, I think Moto have put together a great phone that "does it all" really well. OK so it's not the sexiest phone out there (or almost out there) but it improves on it's predecessors in almost every way. For me, coming from the Droid X, it's a huge difference. Reply
thrasher32 - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - linkI've got the original Droid X and while I like the Bionic, I can't get past that $299 "discount" price, and the accompanying 2 year indentured servitude to Verizon. In addition, I'm still grandfathered into the unlimited data plan, so until my Droid X physically dies, Verizon is outta luck 'cuz I'm gonna stream Netflix all day long without regard to data usage.
When my Droid X finally does die, I'm switching to T-Mobile (like the rest of you), I'm tired of being rectally violated by AT&T and Verizon. Reply
coolfx35 - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - linkI just got the Droid Bionic, So I found a notification sound I like and added it to both a new folder called 'notifications' on both the sdcard and sdcard-ext as well as /system/media/audio/notifications.
It *still* does not show up in settings > sound> notification ringtone. The file is a valid .ogg file. I post this question on http://www.mydroidbionic.com but no answers so far, so someone here please help. Thanks. Reply
synaesthetic - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - linkThis is my issue, personally. While the rush to make beefier and better CPUs and modems for phones seems to be in full swing, nobody seems to be paying attention to making the batteries that power them better.
Battery tech has lagged so far behind mobile tech it's not even funny. Seriously, I love my Android phone (a T-Mobile Nexus S) but I have to charge it pretty much daily. This is an issue for me, though I don't know how many other people care as much, but sometimes I find myself *avoiding* using my phone whenever possible just so I can make sure the battery doesn't go out before I can get to a charger.
Dual core, crazy gaming performance, all of that is nice, but honestly I'd rather have my same Nexus S, with it's same "old" HSPA internets, with it's same old single-core CPU... but with a battery that'll last a full day of continuous heavy use. Reply
TrackSmart - Friday, September 16, 2011 - linkI've been saying for years that it would be great to have a very-well-built *phone* that had absurdly long battery life and zero internet features. Carriers don't allow this. Every Verizon phone must support internet and VCAST video, etc. Imagine a phone that was voice-calls only that was about 95% battery inside. It could last practically forever on a charge, be waterproof, and highly impact resistant.
That being said, once you start talking about smartphones, you are really talking about personal computing devices. And the usual race for the best specifications applies. The smartphone you described would have a dedicated niche market, but wouldn't be the huge 'hit' device that the phone makers are looking for...
HTC or Samsung could make such a phone if they wanted. And Apple, well, they do prioritize battery life more than most carriers. On the Android side, Motorola is usually tops when it comes to voice-call battery life... Reply
lefenzy - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkWhy is it that Anandtech graphs exclude HTC's Droid Incredible 2, a recent phone that offers decent performance in a portable 4inch screen package? As a recent 3G phone comparable to the Droid 3, it is worth including in the graphs. It certainly offers better battery life than the latest LTE and dual core phones. Reply
corymcnutt - Thursday, September 22, 2011 - linkThis was done back on 9/12...when is the full review coming? Reply
amorexue - Thursday, September 22, 2011 - linkwww.loveweddingdress.co.uk is an ideal dress shop Reply
puck - Monday, October 10, 2011 - linkOk it's been a month now... looking for a more detailed review of the camera. Reply

subset: commoncrawl


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UF sends out acceptance notices
Published: Friday, February 8, 2013 at 8:16 p.m.
Last Modified: Friday, February 8, 2013 at 8:16 p.m.
Alex Early sat at her computer for almost an hour as she incessantly restarted her web browser hoping for good news.
About UF's incoming freshman class
The University of Florida posted admission decision online Friday evening for incoming freshmen.
Total Applications: 28,834
Admitted to Summer B/Fall 2013: 11,763
Enrollment goal: 6,400
Admitted to start Spring 2014: 2,114*
Enrollment goal for Innovation Academy: 500
Fall admission profile
Mid 50% GPA: 4.1-4.5
Average GPA: 4.3
Mid 50% SAT: 1840-2100
Average SAT: 1967
Mid 50% ACT: 28-32
Average ACT: 30
After logging into the University of Florida's admissions website over and over Friday night, she got the answer she wanted shortly after 6 p.m.
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The 17-year-old senior at Northeast High School in St. Petersburg joined thousands of her fellow applicants as UF posted its admissions decisions Friday.
"I feel really good," she said breathlessly, minutes after the news.
UF received 28,843 applications for its incoming freshman class. With an enrollment goal of 6,400, the university admitted 12,370 students this year — 9,252 for fall and 3,118 for Summer B.
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Gail David, guidance counselor at Newberry High School, said the atmosphere at school on Monday morning will be a mix of joy and anguish.
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Ret Thomas, guidance counselor at Buchholz High School for 33 years, said he sees a range of attitudes around campus going into decision day every year.
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Western Digital's Advanced Format: The 4K Sector Transition Beginsby Ryan Smith on 12/18/2009 12:00 AM EST
- Posted in
- Storage
87 Comments
Back to Article
davidschorfhaar - Friday, February 12, 2010 - linkfor a service pack to fix this you would have to either get a new install disk with the service pack included or use a utility like Nlite to slipstream the service pack into your install disk. Does anyone know if a simple fix would be to just download a linux iso, burn it to a disk, then boot the live cd and us gparted or qt parted to preformat the disk before you install. I have several of said live cd's already lying around so it would be a simple fix for me... if it works
iforum - Saturday, January 30, 2010 - linkThough this article says that drives with EARS in the drive model (eg. WD10EARS) will have 4k sectors, just a quick calculation from the drive specs on the WD website seems to indicate that these drives still have only 512B sectors.
Formatted Capacity: 1,000,204 MB = 1000204000000B
User Sectors Per Drive: 1,953,525,168
dividing, bytes per sector: 511.9995464527
Even the LBA printed on the label in the article says the same number of sectors: 1,953,525,168
What am I missing?
runeks - Thursday, July 08, 2010 - linkThe drives "pretend" to be 512 bytes per sector-drives, but are really 4 KiB sector-drives.
Apparently they do this both to the BIOS and the dude reading the label - to avoid confusion I guess. Reply
foxyshadis - Saturday, January 23, 2010 - linkHonestly, are you that dense? Companies still make T-Bird parts for many times what they once sold for - try getting one from Ford for free, tell me how that turns out for you. Likewise, if you pay the $250 for MS support they'll often write little barely-tested patches to fix your particular bug. Microsoft, just like Ford, has every financial incentive to get you to upgrade, and will never do more than the bare minimum once you commit to not spending money with them ever again. Reply
Algis - Monday, January 11, 2010 - linkI am, as many here, a technology entusiast.
From my point of view, the big mistake was to use the 7 and 8 pin's jumper for XP workaround and sector shifting. There is WD align utility that solves the issue for old good XP. Now 10% of users will decide that two medicines will work even better than one, so they will both install the jumper, and then align the partitions with some aligment tool. Or, the users will get their systems shipped with XP and jumper installed, and later will upgrade to Windows7. What will happen? In all these cases users will get a 50% decreased performance and drive weared out earlier than necessary due to many read-change-write cycles.
These PINs should been used to just enable native 4KB sectors when pin removed! So anyone with Vista or later OS and NEW PC (with 4KB aware BIOS) can simply take out the jumper and enjoy knowing that now it works in native 4KB.
I would even put the default at 4KB. And put a big warning - XP and older OS users please install the jumper and run the utility after OS installation!
The only limitation would be that if upgrading OS the additional operation is needed - to remove jumper, and then install clean Windows7. Majority of users will be upgrading this way anyway. And going forward it would just be less and less users who need the "XP jumper".
What a mistake...
I am suprised who is taking a product decisions on WD. They release external disks with built-in SmartWare (many users called it CrapWare) that always pop-up as CD letter, and there is no way to have just a clean drive without space wasted for software of no use (most recent firmware allows to disable pop-up CD but users need to flash new firmware to the USB drives).
And now... they release good new 4KB technology and there is NO WAY (no jumper) to just pass 4KB on interface?
No chance to get whats needed (wanted), and obligatory pushing of whats not needed (not wanted). I am fan of WD drives because of their low power consuption, but obligatory SmartWare and no way to allow native 4KB sectors were two wrong product decisions. Reply
tophe - Friday, January 15, 2010 - linkI've bought this drive without knowledge of 4k technology and thus I've big problem because I'm using XP and W7 in my computer. I'd like to use this drive as single partition data drive, but will my data accesible from both OS? And then is it better to format it with W7 ( readable with xp w/out align software? ) or to format it with XP with the align software ( no trouble with W7 after? )? Or maybe I should change it for a normal 512bytes drive... If anyone can help I'd be very happy :) Reply
Algis - Tuesday, March 09, 2010 - linkInitialize the new drive and create both partitions with Windows 7, then you do not need to do anything extra. Windows7 will care about all alignments. Then you can install XP into some partition, if you cannot just use "Windows XP mode" inside Windows7. Reply
ArchStanton1 - Friday, January 08, 2010 - linkWill these Advanced Format drives work with third-party drive encryption software? Reply
xpclient - Saturday, January 02, 2010 - linkThis article (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/92333...">http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/92333... : Windows Vista support for large-sector hard disk drives) lists about Windows support. Reply
toyotabedzrock - Wednesday, December 23, 2009 - linkI'd be willing to bet the people at http://hddguru.com">http://hddguru.com know how or will very soon what commands to use to tell if a drive is of the 4k variety. Reply
Donuts123 - Sunday, December 20, 2009 - linkThe "problem" with Windows XP and earlier (and many other OSes) is that they create partitions which are not aligned on a 4KB boundary.
If you're installing XP on a new drive, the workaround is to partition the drive correctly before installing XP, and have XP install into the existing partition. You can use a Linux boot CD, but you might need to use command-line tools to ensure the partition is aligned, so that's not for novices.
So, what's the effect on performance when using a drive with 4KB physical sectors? If your partition is correctly aligned, there should be no performance decrease. The OS filesystem cluster size defaults to 4KB, so all reads and writes will normally be done in multiples of 4KB anyway. Since there is an effective areal density increase due to the larger physical sectors, you can expect 4KB-sector drives to have a higher data transfer rate than an equivalent 512-byte-sector drive.
So "it's all good", providing your partitions are aligned on a 4KB boundary.
If the partition is not correctly aligned, each filesystem read of n 4KB clusters requires the drive to read n+1 4KB physical sectors. The performance impact of that will be pretty small I think. Most filesystems have a read-ahead feature that reads in larger chunks anyway. The worst-case would be a 4KB random-read benchmark, and even there, no extra disk revolutions are needed.
Writes are the big problem. The impact will be decreased to some extent due to the drive's cache and the computer typically writing data in larger chunks. But read-modify write requires more revolutions of the disk. Each revolution takes 8.3ms for a 7200rpm drive. The worst-case scenario will be much slower than a 512-byte-sector drive.
Consider a 4KB random-write benchmark, i.e. one that writes 4KB of data to random places on the disk. (If your partition is not aligned, then none of the 4KB clusters are aligned.) For each 4KB write, the drive has to do this:
- Read two 4KB sectors.
- Wait while the disk makes one revolution (1/120th sec for a 7200rpm drive)
- Write back the two modified sectors
For every write in that case, an extra revolution of the disk is necessary. The actual worst-case scenario is even worse, but unlikely to be a problem in practice. Consider the case where the two sectors that the drive needs to read are on adjacent physical tracks. (The computer typically won't know where physical track boundaries are.) Then to write a 4KB sector, the drive needs to do this:
- Read the first sector (last sector of a track)
- Wait for a disk revolution
- Write the modified first sector
- Seek to the next track
- Read the second sector (first sector of the track)
- Wait for a disk revolution
- Write the modified second sector
So that requires two extra disk revolutions and a seek.
Solid-state drives have many of the same issues, along with a limited number of flash write cycles. Typically, the SSD flash page size is 4KB. If you use an SSD, you can improve drive performance and lifetime by ensuring your partitions are 4KB-aligned.
For what it's worth, drives with larger-than-512-byte sector sizes have been around for years. Magneto-optical (MO) drives first appeared in the late 1980s, and could use disks with 1024-byte sectors. (In that case though, the drive doesn't emulate a smaller sector size, so there is no problem.)
9.1GB MO drives, which first came out in late 2000, can use disks which have 4KB physical sectors, but the drive emulates 512- or 1024-byte sectors. Just like these new 4KB-sector hard drives.
DVD-RAM discs have 32KB physical sectors, but emulate 2048-byte logical sectors.
nowayout99 - Saturday, December 19, 2009 - linkI can't imagine wanting one of these drives until after the transition. Who would want the performance hit? Reply
leexgx - Saturday, December 19, 2009 - linkwindows 7 own disk backup i am quite sure is alignment aware as well Reply
johnsonx - Saturday, December 19, 2009 - linkI think Steve Gibson better get off his arse one of these days and update Spinrite. I suppose it will probably still work on 4KB drives, but I suspect it will be VERY non-optimal. It needs better support for modern SATA interfaces anyway, so it's time.
TechDicky - Friday, December 18, 2009 - link"Along with the need for 4K-aware operating systems, drive imaging software needs to be 4K-aware. Otherwise such imaging software may inadvertently create misaligned partitions too. As such, Win 6.x is also affected by alignment issues when imaging software is used, as some (and perhaps all?) imaging products currently available will write misaligned partitions and/or clusters."
That is not true of file based imaging such as WIM.
ppelleg - Sunday, February 21, 2010 - linkI think it's correst, instead!!!
When You clone to an empty drive, the disk cloning/imaging software must create the destination partition that MUST be 4K boundaries aligned so they MUST be 4K aware.
I can state it for sure, as I run into the problem!!! After cloning my 500GB to a 1TB WD drive I got a very slow system...
Problem solved using WD utility Reply
puffpio - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkthey talk about using jumpers on the drive to provide various workarounds to the 512b address mapping.
what about a jumper to say "address w/ 512b" which is enabled by default and if you pull the jumper, the hdd will bypass that translation layer and allow direct 4kb addressing? Reply
yuhong - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkDon't forget the 2TB MBR barrier too, which will require either an increase in the sector size that is presented to software, or an move to GPT. Reply
hechacker1 - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkYeah, when I initialized my 3x7200.11 raid5 array I had to use GPT.
Does anybody happen to know if Windows 7 (intel matrix raid) automatically align's the disk correctly? I have tried searching google but Windows 7 and Intel Matrix has me confused.
I am not sure if Windows 7 knows about the underlying disk structure of the matrix raid?
Thanks to anybody who knows. Reply
leexgx - Saturday, December 19, 2009 - linkwindows vista/2008 or higher are aware of alignment and norm correctly set the partitions correctly
if you run diskpart there is an option you can pick to show if it has been incorrectly aligned or not (not sure where thought or there is an tool that lists it) Reply
ChuckR - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkIf 4k will not be the standard till 2014(estimate), When will Sata 6.0 be implemented to improve the speed of Read-Modify-Write conditions.
I read the Seagate Barracuda runs Sata 6.0, BUT only for outer sectors.
Any word on a total solution for HD's? Reply
pbhj - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkhdparm tells me "Logical/Physical Sector size: 512 bytes" but this article tells me:
Unfortunately, at this point the utility also serves as the only way to identify an Advance Format drive without physically looking at it. Looking at the ATA spec, it looks like there's a provision for asking a drive its native sector size (regardless of 512B emulation) but at this point there's no such tool beyond the WD Align utility itself.
So did hdparm just guess .... Reply
GourdFreeMan - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkNo, hdparm just passes along what the drive's controller reports to the kernel. The controller pretends the drive has a 512 byte sector size, even through physically this is not what happens when a write is done by the controller. The same thing already happens with SSDs -- on my Gentoo home server my SSD happily reports:
Logical Sector size: 512 bytes
Physical Sector size: 512 bytes
despite pages being far larger than that. Reply
yacoub - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkAny issues running mixed 4k and 512b drives in the same system? assume the OS (WinXP/Win7) will be able to sort it all out and transferring data from one to the other will occur properly? Reply
excalibur3 - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkIt doesn't really make sense to me why they can't release 4K sector drives without the emulation and just write in big letters "For use with Windows Vista and higher" on it? Consumers now need to be careful about getting SATA vs. PATA drive, what is one more specification that they need to be aware of? Reply
DanNeely - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkYou're assuming users will have something resembling a clue. WD would get its return dept flooded by XP users reporting defective drives.
What they could theoretically do would be to have a jumper setting that changed if they exposed 512b emulation or 4k native sectors to the OS and defaulted it to 512b. This'd work universally out of the box, and would be a trivial fix for the clueful to switch to the optimal mode. Reply
geofelt - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkIf the 4k sector is 10% more space efficient, would that not also also translate into 10% greater data transfer rate. Reply
azmodean - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkIf the raw read is the only bottleneck in the system, you might theoretically get that, but in practice I doubt it's the only bottleneck. That is a good point though, there should be some performance improvement from this (particularly with very large reads.) Reply
icrf - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkI have a couple 1.5 TB Caviar Green drives in a software RAID 5 array (Linux, mdadm, 64K stripe). Anyone know if I'd run into compatibility problems if I expanded the array to include my old drives plus a new 4K drive? I know I wouldn't be able to make use of the extra space, but the better error correction would be nice. Reply
esandrs - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkXP/2003 has a disk partition utility that allows setting offsets. I've used it in 2003 for some SAN environments to do partition alignments. It may not be as automated as the WD tool, but it does work on any drive. Reply
Iridium130m - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkWe've been dealing with alignment issues in the server and SAN space for years, especially with virtualization at the vm level and storage level: wrapping data in vmdks on vmfs on wafl filesystems opens many opportunities for misaligned data and up to a 20% performance hit on saturated systems.
thankfully microsoft FINALLY recognized the issues with server 2008 and formats at a 1mb boundary automatically, which covers the majority of storage arrays and disks. Reply
cjcoats - Friday, December 18, 2009 - link"Caviar Green... They all have 64MB of cache -
the first WD drives to come with that much cache..."
What about the 2TB Caviar Black and Raid Edition drives?
They have 64MB caches, and dual on-board cache-processors.
Is that all there is to their performance edge?
Ryan Smith - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkThat was supposed to be "the first WD Caviar Green drives...". Fixed. Reply
Byte - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkDo the new WD drives give any space advantage? Also will there be any real performane advantage when they release the true higher level 4k clusters? Reply
magreen - Friday, December 18, 2009 - link
One estimate for 4K sector technology puts this at 100 bytes of ECC data needed for a 4K sector, versus 320 (40x8) for 8 512B sectors.
it sounds like you gain a whopping 220 bytes per 4Kb of storage space. That's 5%. Why does WD or anyone else care? Reply
Ryan Smith - Saturday, December 19, 2009 - linkI didn't get in to it in the article, but there's also the benefit of getting rid of other per-sector overhead: sector gaps and sector sync marks. Between that and the ECC improvement, you get the total 7%-11% improvement. Reply
DanNeely - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkBecause it means they need 5% less process shrink for their next generation platters; probably 750GB. Computing less ECC code will let them get away with a marginally cheaper controller chip as well.
Implementing it in current models is mostly as a largescale testbed for the next generation although they could get an additional small performance gain from a 5% short stroke. Reply
Spivonious - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkBecause 5% of 1TB is 51GB? That's not exactly an insignificant amount. Reply
krazyderek - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkIt would be great for any power user that understands the 5.xx limitations of these drive's to be able to purchase them regardless. I'm building a new linux file server for work and i'd love to drop in this new technology instead of knowing about and not being able to take full advantage of it for several years simply due to the fact that microsoft dropped the ball yet again. Reply
Griswold - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkI wonder why the "power user" would want these drives, since they come with a significant performance hit under certain conditions when writing - as mentioned in the article.
To write a 4KB block that spans two physical sectors, the sectors have to be read, data modified and then written. That means the platter has to spin an additional time - thats a pretty big 50% performance hit when it happens.
The benefits (reliability, capacity) are nice, but to me nothing to call home about. I backup daily and weekly. The last drive that failed me was 15 years ago. I'm content with how things are. But I'm not willing to take performance hits for these benefits. So, I hope they find a way around this issue before these drives are the only ones I can buy... Reply
strikeback03 - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkI'd imagine these "power users" would be the ones using an OS that knows what to do with 4k sectors, and would not have the performance problems XP would. And it would be nice if they had a jumper setting (enabled as shipped) to enable or disable the 512b emulation. Thus the only ones likely to disable the 512b emulation are the ones who know what they are doing. Reply
wolrah - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkThis is my thought as well. When SATA2 was new and some first-gen SATA controllers were found to have problems with drives running in SATA2 mode, Seagate shipped their Barracuda 7200.8 (I think) with a jumper installed that disabled SATA2 by default. At the time there was little performance benefit unless you had support for NCQ the whole way up the stack and were multitasking heavily, so most users probably still to this day have that jumper installed whether they need it or not and are none the wiser. Those who knew what they're doing however could remove the jumper and gain a slightly faster burst transfer rate out of disk cache and the various protocol enhancements such as NCQ. Reply
leexgx - Saturday, December 19, 2009 - linkdue to hdds not braking past 90MB/s the jumper on made there drives the most compatible drives around as i have had problems in the past with puling that jumper off on some motherboards (or none segate hdds) not working stable with Sata 2
same issue with Nvidia and Sata 2 on there apple systems wish SSDs had an option to set Sata 1 mode as the only SSD that you most likely going to always work is the corsair S128 as its Sata 1 only Reply
Mr Perfect - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkYes, that would be a great option. I can't be the only one who'd love to enable real 4KB sectors on all of my Windows 7 machines going forward. Reply
ltcommanderdata - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkSo Mac OS X doesn't seemed to have problems with Advanced Format, but what about Boot Camp? Will XP Boot Camp still have issues while Vista and Windows 7 Boot Camp won't or does the Boot Camp partition utility automatically properly aligns things for even Windows XP. Reply
Lukas - Sunday, December 20, 2009 - linkThe bootcamp partitions aren't created by Windows XP, they're created by Mac OS X. Without having studied it, i'd bet that they will be aligned. Reply
Ryan Smith - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkGood question; I don't have an answer to that. Reply
Mr Perfect - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkI don't know if WD is answering followup questions, but could you ask if other virtual machines have this problem too? Specifically, I'm thinking of Windows 7's XP mode. Reply
leexgx - Saturday, December 19, 2009 - linkxp mode is an add-on to windows 7, as windows 7 will all ready be installed the XP mode install does not work at the disk level when it is installed (does not create partitions)
for vmware if its File based VMs it same as win7 XP mode its not working at disk level when partitions are been made inside the VMs(think VMware can be disk based thought but most use file based) Reply
pcfxer - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkAs of December 18, 2009, Bootcamp does NOT align the sectors any differently than the Microsoft installer would. Reply
flynace - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkSo do these drives still run in 512k emulation mode under Win7?
Or does Win7 recognize them as 4k drives thus partitioning and formating them accordingly? Reply
Ryan Smith - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkThey still run in 512B emulation. The emulation is done at the drive controller level; with these WD drives it can not be disabled. Win7 is only aware to the point that it knows not to start a partition at a misaligned logical sector. Reply
therealnickdanger - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkHmm, OK I misread the article. I thought that Windows Vista/7 properly addressed 4KB chunks and it was only XP that was stuck in 512B emu-hell. So the new drives operate at 4KB at the hardware level, but regardless of OS, they are 512B at the interface level? Do we need to wait then for the next batch of WD drives that operate and interface at 4KB in order for Vista/7 to take advantage of this?
I'm really looking forward to the 20% bump in useable storage space. Reply
Candide08 - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkWouldn't the 20% increase in storage still be realized - as long as the drives platters are formatted with the 4k sectors?
The interface would be breaking the 4k transfers into 512 byte chunks for backwards compatibility, at a bit of a performance cost.
When the 4k interfaces are released then the full performance gains will be realized in addition to the storage efficiency increases, yes? Reply
Lukas - Sunday, December 20, 2009 - linkYes. I'd also expect WD to ship some Black Edition drives that will be configurable between 512/4096 sectors on the interface, a long time before all shipped drive will default to 4096. Reply
Ryan Smith - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkYes, you need to wait for WD to ship drives that enable 4K sectors at the interface level. Due to the number of Win 5.x machines still in existence, this is likely a few years off in order to avoid the resulting grief for drive manufacturers. I suspect we're looking at 2014, but it could certainly be earlier. Reply
mczak - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkI'm not sure exactly how 4K sectors will be exposed to the OS, but if the commands accessing the disks are different they could expose this without impacting old OS (by supporting both 512 and 4K access). Even if that's not possible, certainly WD could have made this switchable by jumper, so I can't see why WD would need several years to wait here.
In theory I guess 4K access should be faster (less command i/o) or at least have less cpu overhead, but maybe the gains just aren't significant at all hence WD didn't bother. Reply
azmodean - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkThis is just a little bit misleading, (probably not intentionally though). The current batch of drives will store data in 4K chunks, but will allow the OS to use 512-byte aligned addresses. You will still get the effective capacity increase and improved error correction in the drive, this is transparent to the OS. From what I can tell the only problem is that the drive itself has to work harder, and that there are some newer file systems that can optimize things further if they had a 4K interface size.
With the current batch of drives you get the space and ECC benefits of 4K sectors, but with some minor problems related to translation, which buys you compatibility with win XP.
With the next version of the tech (no idea when this will appear), the drives will remove the compatibility mode, and advanced filesystems will be able to optimize things further. Reply
therealnickdanger - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkLet's hope so! Thanks for clarifying things for my simple brain. ;-) Reply
cjb110 - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkCouldn't the OS issue be fixed in a patch or service pack?
If all manufactures will be going to 4k then it seems like Microsoft needs to start working on a proper fix for this. Rather than leaving to the manfuactures, which might end up producing a multitude of different 'fixes'. Reply
tophe - Friday, January 15, 2010 - linkI've bought this drive without knowledge of 4k technology and thus I've big problem because I'm using XP and W7 in my computer. I'd like to use this drive as single partition data drive, but will my data accesible from both OS? And then is it better to format it with W7 ( readable with xp w/out align software? ) or to format it with XP with the align software ( no trouble with W7 after? )? Or maybe I should change it for a normal 512bytes drive... If anyone can help I'd be very happy :) Reply
foxyshadis - Saturday, January 23, 2010 - linkYou'll be fine, but you MUST partition the drive from windows 7 or with another 4k-aware tool. Do NOT partition it with XP. Both of them will work absolutely fine after that, there's no other tweaks you have to make to get XP working, since it has 512b emulation. Reply
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carl0ski - Monday, December 28, 2009 - linkSince the workarounds basically require the partition to shift across 512 bytes,
From the notes it looks like Windows 5.x will be able to read the drives without issue.
However the partition manager in the Windows installer on the original CD is broken and will not work. along with the partition manager in Computer Manager.
The windows installer didnt change much if at all from the blue screen wizard from NT 4 to Windows 2003 R2 (4.0 - 5.2)
Vista and 2003 use a different installer.
It is impossible or very unlikely that MS will issue new updated Windows Installation Disks that is the main problem/symptom.
If you create a Partition table in Vista / Windows 7 + you may be able to install from the 5.x CDs without trouble since the partitions already exist.
Bill Todd - Thursday, January 07, 2010 - linkFor the next few years the new 4 KB sector drives will emulate older drives and thus be able to be used on any system that could use 512 B sector drives, right back to DOS x.x. They just won't *perform* as well for unaligned writes as the old drives did save in cases where the partition alignment has been fiddled to make things line up more efficiently.
Note, by the way, that this partition alignment can be accomplished manually using older software: just adjust such that each primary partition starts on a physical 4 KB boundary (e.g., for the first partition on a disk start it on the 9th logical 'cylinder' of 63*255 512-byte sectors, since 8*63*255*512 is divisible by 4096). Logical partitions in the 'extended partition' need slightly different alignment to account for the fact that they don't include the first logical 'track' of 63 512-byte sectors, used by the 'extended partition boot record' in the same manner that the first logical 'track' on the disk is occupied by the 'master boot record'. Of course, mere partition alignment won't solve the performance problem if the file system residing in the partition doesn't observe neat 4 KB alignment internally.
(It also may be possible to change the size of the 'track' occupied by the MBR or EPBR to 64 512-byte sectors, which would be a cleaner solution but might confuse some software.)
Over the longer term, it's worth noting that Windows NT and its descendants have always been able to process data drives with sector sizes other than 512 bytes - they just can't boot from them. So save up a few boot drives for the time when no more 512-byte sector drives are available and keep using these systems as long as you care to. Reply
taltamir - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkit is fixed, in non ancient operating systems. Get windows 7...
oh, you mean you want microsoft to upgrade their old OS for free to make it compatible with new technology? Reply
Taft12 - Monday, December 21, 2009 - linkYes, that is what I would like too. Service packs and patches have always been free. Reply
Calin - Sunday, December 20, 2009 - linkYes, that would be great.
Also, USB for Windows NT 4.0 would have been great at that time. Reply
Ryan Smith - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkXP has reached its Extended Support phase. Microsoft will not be releasing anything besides security updates.
There may be other issues too in trying to make Win 5.x 4K-aware, but the fact of the matter is that they're not going to lift a finger while its in Extended Support anyhow. Reply
mcnabney - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkIt appears the WHS is also impacted by this issue and is not in Extended Support. Should I be expecting a fix for my Home Server? Reply
Lukas - Sunday, December 20, 2009 - linkI doubt it. But there are several (easy and viable) workarounds.
Companies that ship WHS systems may precreate the correct partitions and another option would be to create partition tables using a 4K aware partitioning utility, for example by booting into a Windows 7 Setup and creating the partitions there. Reply
mcnabney - Monday, December 21, 2009 - linkMy concern is that WHS is kind of designed to last a long time. I don't know what a new build of WHS based upon Server08 is going to offer the consumer. I really envisioned my server staying as it is for a long time, only occasionally adding a drive to the pool as needed. I have a 14-bay case, plus the ability to add external racks, so I have a lot of potential growth. I would prefer not having a headache in 2011 when these drives are the standard. I also don't see the need to upgrade/replace my server until the hardware dies. It isn't like an OS that you use every day that can always use a revision. Reply
DanNeely - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkAlso. Has MS released any major core OS updates to WHS since the rest of windows 5.x went onto extended support? Patches to things that are WHS specific don't count. I'm asking about features that are/should be common with XP/2k3. Reply
DanNeely - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkI wouldn't hold my breath. The HW companies have work around's available even if they're suboptimal; and WHS has a fairly small userbase to justify a major engineering effort. Especially since a new version of WHS based on server 08 is rumored to be coming next year and patching the current WHS would only draw attention to not patching XP/server 2k3. Reply
azmodean - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkYes, there would be HUGE issues throughout the file system stack, and also bleeding over into page table management, memory management, DMA, drivers, and who knows what else. It's not a simple fix at all, and even if they weren't halting support for winXP, I doubt they'd be willing to make the necessary changes.
Linux went through this process a while back, and it was a very extensive set of changes even though Linux was more modular than windows to start with. Reply
mczak - Friday, December 18, 2009 - linkWe're not talking about making XP 4K blocks aware, but simply let it create partitions aligned on 4K boundaries. This would be a trivial fix. But yes it's not a security issue so no luck.
btw I wonder what the performance is like if partition is unaligned. Noone tested? Reply
ppelleg - Sunday, February 21, 2010 - linkYes... and it was terrible!!!
After aligning the stuff using WD Align (the WD utility) the problem was solved and I get back performances... Reply
evalfi - Monday, April 12, 2010 - linkI installed XP SP3 on an older master drive (40GB)
Then from XP I choose to format the WD10EARS slave drive in logical sectors of 4K.
Will it still be necessary to run the alignment tool on this Drive?
Greetz & Thanks Reply
ken1945 - Saturday, April 17, 2010 - linkDoes anyone know if WD 4K drives that were originally formatted on a Mac using OSX, will have any alignment problems when running XP on that Mac under Bootcamp, VM Fusion, Parallels, etc?
FYI, I remember back in the late 1970s when Wang transitioned from 256B sectors to 1K blocks when their hard drive storage cabinets (the size of a small desk!) increased to 80MB. No transition problems except for hernias. Reply
MrCyberdude - Tuesday, May 11, 2010 - linkWhat a nightmare these WD20EARS drives have given me with the 4k cluster overlap.
The ReadyNas Pro speed is down to 1/5th the speed of 22MB/sec write. when tested with Bonnie++ and actual file copies.
A complete joke that WD states that it does not support Linux.
A complete Joke that Netgear has not tested these drives and got them working with their product as they are a Major HDD supplier.
MrCyberdude Reply
mfreesto - Sunday, September 12, 2010 - linkSo how will 4K affect RAID set ups? I setup several WD 20EARS drives in RAID 5, and of course Win7 only sees one' drive'. Has the RAID controller correctly aligned the drive?
The WD Align tool is no use as it sees the RAID array as a non-WD drive.
This is using the built in nVidia RAID on an Asus M3N78-EM. nVidia is silent on the issue, and the WD website doesn't discuss RAID in the context of AFT.
Anyone got any insights? Reply
dragonf - Monday, November 08, 2010 - linkCorrect me if I am wrong, but after reading this article on 4k sectors:
I assume that it is possible to align Advanced Format drives (those ones, which are not provided with a special aligning software by HD manufacturer) for Windows XP usage with 3rd party 4k-aware partitioning utility:
"The most critical aspect of a smooth and successful transition to 4K sectors used in Advanced Format is to promote the use of 4K-aware hard drive partitioning tools."
"When using third-party software or utilities to create hard drive partitions, check with your vendor to make sure they are updated and confirmed to be 4K aware."
So to align properly for Win XP usage for example Samsung 2TB F4EG HD204UI one has to find a 3rd party software tool for partitioning, which is 4k-aware, and use that software to partition such disk instead of Windows XP Disk Manager.
Are there any free 4k-aware partitioning tools for Windows XP?
Also would re-aligning utilities provided by WD and Seagate work with other manufacturers HDs like Samsung?
From that article I learnt also that even the newer OSes like Windows 7 do not use 4k sectors directly, they still have to use 512 B sectors. Those newer systems are only capable of aligning Advanced Format hard drives properly during their partitioning, without the need to use 3rd party 4K-aware partitioning software, and that's all:
"there are many aspects of modern computing systems that continue to assume that sectors are always 512 bytes. To transition the entire industry over to the new 4K standard and expect all of these legacy assumptions to suddenly change is simply not realistic. Over time, the implementation of native 4K sectors, where both host and hard drive exchange data in 4K blocks, will take place. Until then, hard drive manufacturers will implement the 4K sector transition in conjunction with a technique called 512-byte sector emulation."
"The sector size increase, described by Advanced Format, occurs at the hard drive media level. Host systems will continue to request and receive data from the hard drive in 512-byte sector sizes. However, the translation from 4096-byte sectors in the hard drive to the 512-byte sectors in the host will be managed in the hard drive. This process is called 512-byte emulation. It's important that every drive partition start with an LBA offset that is aligned to the drive's physical 4K sector. If partitions are un-aligned, then hard drive performance will be degraded."
"How can partition misalignment conditions be managed?
The first management step is to avoid misaligned conditions in the first place. This can be achieved by creating hard drive partitions with a 4K aware version of your operating system or through a hard drive imaging software product."
"The second method to managing misaligned partitions is to use partition-alignment software to identify and fix misaligned partitions. This technique should be used during the hard drive integration process."
"It's not practical to make host computer systems talk in 4K native language – at least for a while. There are just too many places the 512 byte assumption is embedded. So, while hard drives will transition to 4K sectors physical sectors on the media, they will still "look and talk" like 512 byte formats to host computers. They will actually emulate 512 byte communications to hosts. This works well as long as the logical 512 byte assumptions from the host computer are aligned with the 4K sectors on the hard drive."
"It turns out that when a hard drive partition is created, the starting position can vary. A 4K drive format is set to work under the assumption that the first 512 byte sector (Logical Block Address = 0) will align perfectly with the first physical 4K sector".
"Alignment 0 ... works well for hard drives & 512 byte emulation because they can neatly map eight 512 byte logical blocks into a single sector. Sometimes hard drive partitions get created so the logical to physical alignment is off...".
"This is called Alignment 1 and it's not so good for 4K drives when it comes to emulating 512 byte legacy sectors, especially when writing data. Essentially, this alignment can often cause a hard drive to manage a write with extra disc rotations, which slows things down. The results can be sort of dramatic as shown by these test results at HOTHARDWARE.com"
"The Windows XP situation seems fairly well understood in the marketplace. What is much less understood is the situation with cloning and imaging software. System builders, integrators and IT organizations frequently rely on these tools to configure systems for sale or deployment in their organization. Even if you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7, if your hard drive was partitioned with one of these utilities, you're likely to end up with an un-aligned partition with the potential for poor performance."
Video on 4K sectors:
Seagate manages aligment problems in the background without any interaction or knowledge of user.
BTW, a warning against 2TB hard drives:
http://www.clearfoundation.com/component/option,co... Reply
imwithid - Sunday, November 14, 2010 - linkThere seems to be much confusion and I feel as though I'm being thrown in. This seems to be, as far as I've been able to find, an x86 issue for XP users (not sure about Vista or 7). For those running Windows XP x64 Edition, this software layer interface to firmware level should not be an issue when it comes to alignment.
That said, however, I suspect that Windows XP x64 Edition still formats a new, raw unformatted hard drive into 512 bit sectors during install, thereby requiring either an external live CD or boot CD that can properly format the drive's partition sector mapping into the 4096 bit Advanced Format that exists at the firmware level. Otherwise, the alignment problem will appear as the partition addresses may attempt to locate a sector at a point partway into the larger section.
Can anyone confirm this? Reply
airesearch - Wednesday, January 05, 2011 - linkI have two new un-partitioned 1TB Black WD drives that I'll be using for data storage. Even though they don't indicate Advanced Formatting on them, If I partition them for 4k sectors and quick format them at 4096 allocation unit size will they work ok with XP PRO SP2? Reply
bobbozzo - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link"Farther down the road will be the exposure of 4K-sectors to the operating system itself. Linux and Win 6.x are set (and we believe that Mac OS X is too), the only limit right now is the desire to do a phased transition to make thing easier for legacy users. Since 4K-sector drives won't work on Win 5.x at all, drive manufacturers can't put them on the market so long as there's a significant legacy base. 2014 – the year that extended support ends for WinXP – looks like a good year to finally complete the move to 4K sectors."
It's already happening...
I just bought a 3TB Western Digital My Book Studio LX, Model WDBACH0030HAL-NESN. I chose this drive in because I wanted Firewire (it also has USB), and I did not want to go with the Seagate dockable drives due to reports (here) of overheating (the WD LX is in an well-ventilated aluminum case).
Many websites are listing this drive as compatible with Windows XP, so I ordered it from Amazon.
The box says "formatted for Mac OS X"... and "requires reformatting for Windows XP, Vista, or 7".
In much smaller print, it says "Windows XP does not support drives with capacities greater than 2TB".
I took that to mean that I can't create a partition over 2TB, which I expected anyways.
Upon connecting the drive to an XP PC, a 'virtual CD' was mounted with utilities. I ran the quick format utility, but it eventually fails saying something like "the sector size cannot be changed with your firmware version".
After fruitlessly searching for help, I called WD and they eventually told me this drive is not supported in XP, and there is no way to adjust the sector size or enable translation.
The primary purpose of this drive was to take an image of a Win2003 server using VMWare Converter from a laptop running XP. This turned out to be impossible, but I was able to put a firewire card in the server (it only had USB1.0) and make an image directly.
However, after that was done, I was planning to use this drive to backup my PCs, most of which are running XP.
I have one machine running Win7 but it does not have Firewire; I may have to buy a firewire card.
My PC at work is also XP, so there will be no way to use this drive to move data from home to work.
I am also disappointed that no major-brand 2-3tb drives seem to exist with 2 or more of the following:
I know it's possible because some of the external case manufactures make cases with USB 2, eSATA, and Firewire 800 in on, but I've had too many bad experiences with third-party cases (poor ventilation, failed fans, failed power supplies, weak plug connections, ...)
Seagate comes close with their docks, but the base model is USB 3 only, and additional docks are $30-50 EACH, and they are bulky to carry around.
FYI, at least one MAC website lists this drive as being a NAS as well as having Firewire, but that is incorrect. From the pictures, however, it was impossible to tell as the Firewire 800 ports are indistinguishable from CAT5 in small pictures.
Also, the USB port is a mini-USB so one has to always carry an (included) cable around with it if one wants to use USB.
Perhaps one day USB 3 will be the only connector we need for external storage, but I've had bad experience with high CPU usage on USB 2 and I don't see any evidence that USB 3 is better (still no DMA).
Thanks for the informative article, btw.
Bob Reply
James5mith - Friday, May 27, 2011 - linkThis article, and the 4K "conversion" has been happening for some time, and yet I have still been unable to find 4K native devices.
I'm interested to see a rundown of what is and isn't possible with 4K drives, if there is any kind of throughput benefits and/or IOPS benefits, etc.
Do you know of anything coming within the next 6 months or so? Reply
alpinemobile - Saturday, October 22, 2011 - linkAdvanced Format Drive Fix for Windows XP (Solution, workaround).
After reading a lot of crap about Advanced Format drives having problems with Windows XP and other old OSes, I decided to post this easy fix. So if you want to use the Advanced Format Drive with other OSes than Vista or 7 do this one easy thing after you purchase the drive.
Create all the partitions on the disk using Acronis Disk Director 11 (or later). Remember to tell Acronis Disk Director that you'll be using the drive for Windows 7, even though you'll use it for XP or other OS. Do not use any obsolete partitioning tools like Acronis Disk Director 10 or Windows XP disk management! The old partitioning tools will create the partitions misaligned!
That's all you have to do!
You can do a test and see if you have done everything right by running this utility: Dell Utility Advanced Format HDD Detection Tool. Just Google it.
You'll see whether your partitions are Aligned or Misaligned.
If you delete a partition using Windows XP and recreate it using Windows XP it will be misaligned again.
So use Acronis Disk Director 11 to recreate it and everything will be fine again. Reply


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