klubad wrote:
I bought an external WD HD yesterday, a My Book Essential 1.5T. The HD in the box is a WDC WDC WD15EARS-00Z5B1
hdparm -I /dev/sdb/dev/sdb:ATA device, with non-removable media Model Number: WDC WD15EARS-00Z5B1 Serial Number: WD-WMAVUxxxxxxx Firmware Revision: 80.00A80[…] Logical Sector size: 512 bytes Physical Sector size: 4096 bytes Logical Sector-0 offset: 0 bytes
Wait, there seem to be something different (and hopefully good) in what _ klubat _ has posted.
It seems the 1.5 TB drive he got is correctly reporting the 4kB physical block size. This is something I haven’t seen reported by any other Advance Format EARS drive owner in this thread or other Internet discussions so far.
Could it be that WD has changed things in the “00Z5B1” models to correctly report the physical block size for the benefit of the Linux-based partitioning tools and so help people avoid getting non 4kB-aligned partitions?. Or maybe the difference is in the fact he’s is the drive inside a external My Book Essential?.
For comparison, I’ve just bought an internal 1 TB WD10EARS 64MB cache Caviar Green drive with the same firmware version as his (80.00A80) but with a 00Y5B1 suffix in the model number that, just like all other posters’ (here and other Internet discussions), reports 512B both for the physical and logical blocks sizes:
$ sudo ./hdparm -Vhdparm v9.28$ sudo ./hdparm -I /dev/sdb/dev/sdb:ATA device, with non-removable media Model Number: WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1 Serial Number: WD-WMAV5 ******* Firmware Revision: 80.00A80[...]Configuration:[...] Logical/Physical Sector size: 512 bytes
My kernel version is 2.6.33.x. and the drive has no jumper between pins 7-8.
