so the weather is finally good enough that we are back in our outdoor unboxing
location yay and to celebrate the occasion we are going to be unboxing
Another Western Digital 1 tbte hard drive yay no I'm just kidding there's
something special about this this is a Western Digital 1 tbte green hard drive
but the thing that you should notice about it is besides having a 64 Meg
cache which is thumbs up it is a wd10
ears so the E ARS in the part number
means that this is an advanced format drive now what Advanced format means is
that this drive uses 4 kilobyte sectors
instead of 512 by sectors what that means in layman's terms is that the
drive is able to in the future with this technology achieve much greater data
densities than a more traditional drive so why don't we get started with the
unboxing or unbagging as it were of this uh Western Digital green ears
drive so there's the drive itself and inside we will find oh I'm very fond of
these do not eat okay silica gel don't eat that please thank you these are not
little um like bubble pea things I don't
have them okay so uh let's look at the drive physically first so it's a pretty
typical 3 and 1/2 in drive you got your three mounting holes on the one side you
got nothing here you have three mounting holes on the other side on the bottom
you will find your pretty standard looking PCB with two mounting holes on
either side and then at the back you will find a standard SATA power as well
as a SATA 2 interface with some jumper pins and whatnot now I want to talk a
little bit about what Advanced format means now Advanced format won't bother
newer operating systems like macOS X Vista or Windows 7 but if you are
running and I'm just going to put this up here so that everyone can see it if
you are running Windows XP with a
multi-partition or you are using cloning software you need to use the WD align
software available at www.wdc.com slad format so that's
Advanced format and then you will be able to use that tool to make the drive
perform properly because if you don't the partition will not be aligned
properly with the new sector size and the drive will perform very very poorly
okay now if you are running Windows XP with a single partition it's a simple as
setting jumper 7 to8 prior to installation or using the WD align
software now they recommend using the WD align software rather than the jumper
just because it's a more complete solution but the jumper will work if you
just want a grab and go sort of way to get this running right out of the box
all other OS configurations the drive is ready for use as is like I mentioned
before so Windows Vista Windows 7 OSX
don't even think about it whereas with Windows XP I mean remember that's it's a
seven 8-year-old operating system at this point it didn't know that we were
going to make this radical change so with Windows XP make sure you either set
jumper 7 and 8 or use the WD Aline software thanks for checking out my
unboxing and I think we're done now