Help with formatting

I have a question about formating my drive. I purchased the 3TB My Book Studio Firewire drive, and it came formatted for the Mac. I am a PC user, so I went in and formatted it for the PC. It works fine, but when I formatted it, it set up two partitions, One says it is an EFI System Partition (it is only 200 mb), and the other says it is an NTFS Primary partition. I have a couple other backup drives on my computer and they just have the one main partition. Is there any way that I can make the Studio have only one partition? I have tried reformatting, I tried downloading and using the Data Lifegaurd program (which couldn’t see the drive), but n0othing seems to work. Any suggestions? Thanks.

Brent

btrimble,

Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics should be able to detect and write zeros to your WD My Book Studio in order to create a fully clean volume, however, it is recommended to use the USB port as FireWire may not allow the utility to function using its full potential due to driver variations.

Thanks for your response. I tried the WD Data LiofeGuard Diagnostics and it wouldn’t allow me to get rid of the small partition, but one of the posts on this forum suggest using a program called EaseUS Partition Master and that seemed to work just fine. It is up and running now.

But I do have one other question. I have a couple of programs that check read/write speeds for your disk drives. I have an SD drive and a couple of internal hard drives - and the My Book Studio External hard drive - hooked up via Firewire 800. When I tested all of my drives, the Studio drive tested the poorest of all my drives - nowhere near what I thought a Firewire 800 drive should test at. My Max write speeds range from 126 MB/S to 217 MB/S - and the Studio Firewire drive comes in at 69 MB/S. On the read speeds the other drives range from 103 MB/S to 500 MB/S with the Studio drive coming in at 82 MB/S. Is this normal? I think all my internal drives are SATA drives. Do I need to change any settings on the drive or on my computer to use the full Firewire 800 speed? Thanks for your help.

btrimble,

Internal SATA disk drives are much faster than external FIreWire disk drives. Please bear in mind that the maximum output on an ideal system using FireWire is 800 Mb/s, or 100 MB/s, which means a peak performance of 82 MB/s is quite positive based on your physical system specifications, optimizations and bottlenecks.

Thanks so uch for your response. It is good to know what  a dealing wih now. Thanks again.

btrimble,

It is a pleasure to assist.