WD's 'Advanced Format' Caviar Green HDD gets benchmarked, minor benefits found
By Darren Murph 
posted February 27th 2010 2:01AM
posted February 27th 2010 2:01AM
Western Digital has yet to actively market its "advanced format" hard drives -- in fact, there's a decent chance you've no idea what we're talking about if you weren't tuned in on December 11th. In short, it's a technology that alters a hard drive's sector size from 512 bytes (the standard for the past three decades) to 4096K, which enables the ECC data to be stored in a more efficient manner. Just recently, WD began to ship Advanced Format Caviar Green hard drives, and the benchmarking gurus over at Hot Hardware strapped one in to see exactly how much of the hype was warranted. For starters, they debunked the thought that Advanced Format drives offered more usable space; Windows reported 931GB of free space on both AF and non-AF 1TB drives. They also go on to explain how to make AF drives play nice with Windows XP, and on the testing front, they found that an aligned AF Caviar Green drive could (mostly) hang with the higher end (and more expensive) Caviar Black. Pop that source link for the full skinny, particularly if you're a WinXP user looking to snag a new drive.
I HEAR these hard drives are pretty nice.
@Leindurstit
I heard that they have Blast Processing.
@Zac89 I hear they come in three refreshing flavors - Magnetic Mango, Platter Papaya and Read/Write Raspberry.
@Leindurstit
You guys must have good EARS.
webos 1.4 is here baby.. check your phone now ;)
@paplay really? i'm about to check. That said. Heard it before. lol.
@paplay downloading.
i have a caviar green in an external drive. When i ran xp it had problems at start up. if it was plugged in during startup the computer would hang. i don't know if it was a usb connection issue on the enclosure but i don't think so. i had to wait and plug it in right when the windows screen appeared.
another problem was i'd stream to my 360 and for some reason the 360 seems to lose sight of the drive. i think it may have to do with the low power mode green drives seem to go into that maybe shuts it off to save money. not sure. No issues using windows 7 though at startup or with the 360.
@blackmagic01
Check your BIOS settings. You may have set "boot from USB" above "boot from first hard drive." Try disabling boot from USB or move it to the bottom of the list and see if it works.
Hahaha EARS
any word on AF Black drives?
I ruff I lose?
How about testing that on Linux which actually supports 4k sector size...
@(Unverified)
They tested it on W7 which supports 4K sectors.
@(Unverified)
Just make sure you don't let Linux take those drives at their word. They lie to you so that they can work with XP. They pretend to be "old fashioned" drives. If you don't partition them right (on a proper physical block boundary) then there's performance problems.
Just bought 2 WD10EARS drives last week, and I ran into 2 cases that the WD Align software can't handle:
- Windows xp running with RAID0 array;
- Windows XP Mode in Windows 7
As a result both of them read/write slower than using CD..
It should be fine if you only use Windows 7, or xp on a single drive.
Unfortunately, those 2 cases are essential to me, so I have to buy another 2 drives without Advanced Format...
@EvilEmperor you can flip the drive to ext2 and let xp use that in raid 0. install/format as ext2 is not present in the xp installer as an option, so you'll need to format the drive with some other machine first, then install xp using a modded iso with /ignore permanently set on the disc.
@blland Running OS on an unsupported format doesn't sound "secure" (can't think of a better term since I don't know much English) to me..
Anyway, I still plan to buy other model because I find these 2 perform slightly slower than my 2 old RE2 WD3201ABYS drives.
@EvilEmperor
Why in the heck would you think about using a 'Green' drive in any sort of RAID array? RAID 0 is designed for speed. These are designed for energy savings which means the platters spin down and it shuts off frequenty.
You need to invest in RAID ready drives. My Samsung F1 enterprise class drive cost me less then $100 and is the fastest 1TB on the market.
If you want a reliable RAID array, stay away from 'Green' drives or any bargin based drive. You're setting yourself up for data loss.
@EM1 Because I know nothing about this Advanced Format before I bought those 2.
I just wanted bigger drives, so went to the shops, saw the price listings, oh this has 64MB cache, and the cheapest of 1TB too.
That's why I got those 2.
I don't like Samsung from my past experience tho.
@EvilEmperor
What I mentioned has absolutely nothing to do with advanced format.
Are the green drives still a 3 year warrenty? Do we have an idea when Black (5 year Warrenty) will be available?
mcl
You said the sector size changed from 512 bytes to "4096K", but you mean 4K or 4096 bytes.
A little OT but I just installed a Caviar Black 1TB drive into my Mac Pro and formatted it. It says I have 999.86 GB available, which seems odd given that you usually lose more than a few GB after formatting. I previously had a 4 drive (320gb each) RAID setup and definitely had less than 1,280GB available right off the bat.
@alexlr Mac OS X 10.6 uses the hard drive manufacturer's definition of a gigabyte, as opposed to the computer users' definition of a gigabyte.
@ATimson Thanks for the knowledge!
I picked up the 2TB Advanced Format drive to use as a Time Machine backup on the Mac Pro. Seems to work fine.
I had always assumed that both AF and non-AF would have the exact same storage capacity, but I figured the space that files took up would be less (i.e. a large file would occupy 400MB of space vs 360MB of space due to the decreased use of Sync/DAM and ECC sectors.) This doesn't look to be the case using a direct Get Info comparison between original and backup file sizes, but maybe I'm missing something here.
Been avoiding the caviar greens ever since I heard that their energy saving firmware has conflicts when running under some linux distros. Ended up going with samsung spinpoint ecogreen drives for my media storage needs. The controller on them is more reliable too which leads to fewer failures than the caviar green.
I've had a Mybook II for about a year now or so...and it is pathetic. Stay away from WD Green drives like it was the plague. They are hard-coded to turn off after 10 minutes and it cannot be changed. If you run anything other than Windows 7 it will drive you insane. Your computer will pause while it tries to scan the drives and waits while they spin up. Every freaking time I opened My Computer or opened a folder that had a shortcut to something on the drive, windows would scan the drive and freeze my entire computer for 5 seconds or more. I ended up writing a program to keep the drives awake all the time.
However, I upgraded to Windows 7 (from Vista) and the problem really didn't affect me any more. So, 7 must have improved it somehow.
Finally, if you plan on running Virtual Machines off this drive (like I do), you will regret it. The drive shuts off if there's no activity and your VM will be hosed.
Dang it I hate WD Green drives!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But I swear by all of their other drives though... I still love WD and have for more than a decade.
p.s. I know you can change some setting in Windows to not scan the folders or something...but screw that, the green drives should be changeable.
@refiner Oh god I was wondering why it was doing that to me. I would open recycle bin and have the system hang, while I hear the drive spinning up, seeking and then my system starts responding.
Oddly, I'm in Windows 7 and am having these problems. It may also be related to me using eSATA.
The problem is Windows Home Server, which is based on Server 2003, which does NOT support this 4K sector drives. This limits the storage upgradability, and for a server, that's a huge bummer. For those looking to buy Western Digital drives for Windows Home Server, find the EADS models, not the EARS models (the one with the 4K sector). If you bought the EARS model already, don't forget to set the jumper before you do anything else. If you do that, than you don't have to go through the painful partition alignment process.
@pika2000 just thought the same. have to look with eyes open while extending my storage (which is on my plan for in the next weeks/months..)
at least till upgrading to vail, that is..
@pika2000
I have two of these drives in my home server and haven't noticed any problems. What would the problem be?