AF drives do not show as AF under XP

This is strange.

Installed the VR 500 drives in raid 1 recently.

First thing I did was install and format it under 7 to which is was recognized as AF and I aligned it and benched it.

I then removed the partition and put it into a XP machine and had RST rebuilt to it.

The drive shows up as non-AF and shows aligned which it should not be.

Strange further the drive is still extremely fast in all benches as it is.

As of now I have no idea if it is aligned or not, WDalign says it is even though it never was.

I tried a trick and removed the drive with metadata to the 7 machine as it  might recognize it is not aligned, same scenario.

I could try to partion and format it under 7 so the physical disc is correct and then insert into XP, the logical should then align and if not just maybe WDalign will recognize it and do it’s job.

what is the model number?

WD5000HHTZ

What has to be done is the raid 1 set has to be reset, the drive was then running single and showed up as AF and NOT aligned.

After alignment the writes as expected went up quite a bit especially 4K writes.

Now though if I take my still bagged VR and build a new raid 1 mirror if the aligned copy will copy exactly to the VR?

Once I put them in raid WDalign cannot see them thus it is clueless if they are aligned or not.

I would have to raid, reset the raid yet again so I have two drives, two copies of my OS, align both separately and then create raid 1 yet again.

Another choice could be to use acronis to clone but not transfer NT signature so both drives can be in the machine at the same time but not in raid.

Run alignment on the 2nd drive so the partiion is correct and then proceed to mirror them.

This should result with two VR drives aligned.

This could all be much easier if acronis alignment could “see” drives in raid and whether they are AF or not.

It does “see” the drives, it did on my last pair but they were not AF and they were aligned due to being 512K native drives.

Maybe acronis will update this program to align raid arrays but it’s not going to help me right now