Formatting a 4k sector Advanced Format hard drive

[akirafactor]

With gparted make sure when creating a new first partition that it is ~not~ aligned to cylinder. Set free space to 1M before the first partition which should be sector 2048 and you are set.

I tried resize/move in gparted to try to align a partition and that did not work at all.

The start block of every partition on the drive should be a multiple of 8, 4K divided by 512B. Rounded up of course, you can't cut into the partition preceding it.

Unfortunate that like a line of dominoes, if the first block is misaligned in the partition, then every block is misaligned in that partition.

If the partitions are misaligned, then the write speed of the drive will be about 3 times slower than normal.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-4kb-sector-disks/

A cheater way to get it aligned using windows is format the drive with your partition setup you want in gparted, but make all the partitions ~FAT~ format. Now boot into or connect the drive to a windows machine and use the WD tool to align the partitions. Now boot into or connect to linux and reformat those partitions to whatever format you want, but don't mess with the sizes or anything. Now you have a complex, but aligned drive.

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=805

[Nafees]

So, I have to start my first partition at sector 64 and partition after it must start at a sector that is a multiple of 8? Let's say I would like to format a drive using this format, the first partition would start at sector 64, lets say that the first partition is about 3.9gb and the start of the next sector should be 8376758, I should fix it and manually start from sector 8376760 for the next partition. I haven't fully understood this yet, so please tell me if I'm correct as I plan on purchasing a 750gb scorpio blue which comes with advanced formatting. Also, in practice when I set drakx to partition from sector 64, It is noted as 124 when I click ok after I am done filling out the fields in the partition creation menu. would it cause problems if it starts formatting from a sector later than 64?

[Was_Just19]

It is my impression that such things are picked up automatically ....  maybe dependent on the method/app used for creating the partitions.

Does GParted not create partitions correctly on such drives?

[Nafees]

I think the latest versions do support 4k formatting but I'm not really sure. I'm concerned because I really want to purchase the new 750gb scorpio blue, since I have lots of media. I don't want to take any risks and would like to find out whether there would be any issues right now and how to overcome them as I plan on installing a fresh copy of pclos on it. If the disk is misaligned, the performance hit could be substantial, I've read in a few posts on other forums that there have been desktop freezes and painfully slow transfer speeds as a result. I think I might just buy a 500gb scorpio black instead, if this proves to be too troublesome.

[akirafactor]

Updated the first post with all the latest info and software I used to partition, format, and align my advanced format drive.

I ended up having to open up my external to find out it was an advanced format drive.

[Was_Just19]

With gparted make sure when creating a new first partition that it is ~not~ aligned to cylinder.

Did you select to align it to MiB? ....  or what selection did you make in Gparted for this?

[akirafactor]

With gparted make sure when creating a new first partition that it is ~not~ aligned to cylinder.

Did you select to align it to MiB? ....  or what selection did you make in Gparted for this?

MiB alignment works.

[Was_Just19]

With gparted make sure when creating a new first partition that it is ~not~ aligned to cylinder.

Did you select to align it to MiB? ....  or what selection did you make in Gparted for this?

MiB alignment works.

Thanks 

[Nafees]

Thanx a lot akirafactor, this is a very helpful tip for the new series of drives coming out.
Now I can purchase the new 750gb scorpio blue.
+1000 for akirafactor