Linux and Western Digital Advanced Format Drives

As some hard drive buyers might be aware, 4K-sector hard drives have already appeared in the market. Anandtech has a quick primer on these Advanced Format drives, and how they're different.

One point to nitpick on, though: while Linux is capable of creating aligned partitions, not all its partitioning tools do so by default. GParted creates an msdos partition table on new drives by default, and it starts at LBA 63. The result of this is a noticeable slowdown in file transfer to and from the Advanced Format drive.

At the time of this post, the only drives available with 4K-sectors are the Western Digital Caviar Green Series, designated with the model name “EARS” (the older models are labelled “EADS”). If you are using one of these new drives under Linux, you should personally ensure that the partition starts on a mod-8 LBA in order to avoid unpleasant performance loss. A quick guide is available over at the WDC forums.

A summarised snippet of the code:

parted /dev/DEVICE_NAME
(parted) mklabel gpt
(parted) unit s
(parted) mkpart primary ext4 40 -1
(parted) quit

mkfs.ext4 -T largefile4 /dev/DEVICE_NAME


I have written a short snippet on boosting performance of Advanced Format drives in Linux by aligning partitions in the next post.