Western Digital 1TB Caviar Green Advanced Format Hard Drive Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2010-05-08
·
599 words · ~2 min read
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so the weather is finally good enough that we are back in our outdoor unboxing
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location yay and to celebrate the occasion we are going to be unboxing
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Another Western Digital 1 tbte hard drive yay no I'm just kidding there's
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something special about this this is a Western Digital 1 tbte green hard drive
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but the thing that you should notice about it is besides having a 64 Meg
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cache which is thumbs up it is a wd10
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ears so the E ARS in the part number
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means that this is an advanced format drive now what Advanced format means is
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that this drive uses 4 kilobyte sectors
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instead of 512 by sectors what that means in layman's terms is that the
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drive is able to in the future with this technology achieve much greater data
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densities than a more traditional drive so why don't we get started with the
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unboxing or unbagging as it were of this uh Western Digital green ears
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drive so there's the drive itself and inside we will find oh I'm very fond of
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these do not eat okay silica gel don't eat that please thank you these are not
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little um like bubble pea things I don't
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have them okay so uh let's look at the drive physically first so it's a pretty
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typical 3 and 1/2 in drive you got your three mounting holes on the one side you
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got nothing here you have three mounting holes on the other side on the bottom
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you will find your pretty standard looking PCB with two mounting holes on
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either side and then at the back you will find a standard SATA power as well
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as a SATA 2 interface with some jumper pins and whatnot now I want to talk a
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little bit about what Advanced format means now Advanced format won't bother
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newer operating systems like macOS X Vista or Windows 7 but if you are
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running and I'm just going to put this up here so that everyone can see it if
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you are running Windows XP with a
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multi-partition or you are using cloning software you need to use the WD align
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software available at www.wdc.com slad format so that's
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Advanced format and then you will be able to use that tool to make the drive
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perform properly because if you don't the partition will not be aligned
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properly with the new sector size and the drive will perform very very poorly
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okay now if you are running Windows XP with a single partition it's a simple as
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setting jumper 7 to8 prior to installation or using the WD align
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software now they recommend using the WD align software rather than the jumper
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just because it's a more complete solution but the jumper will work if you
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just want a grab and go sort of way to get this running right out of the box
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all other OS configurations the drive is ready for use as is like I mentioned
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before so Windows Vista Windows 7 OSX
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don't even think about it whereas with Windows XP I mean remember that's it's a
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seven 8-year-old operating system at this point it didn't know that we were
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going to make this radical change so with Windows XP make sure you either set
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jumper 7 and 8 or use the WD Aline software thanks for checking out my
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unboxing and I think we're done now