Can I use any of this to make AFT drive work on XP in RAID? Before drive is initialized WD Align, does not handle it and after it is included in RAID and partitioned it does not handle it as well as it does not regard it as a WD drive anymore.
Or do I need bother at all?
If I use RAID it will have “chunk size” 4K or above, say 64K. Does this automatically makes the emulated sector alignment a non-issue and RAID controller will always read/write 64K blocks of consecutive “physical sectors”? And any other soft that writes to this drive will use this “chunk size” as the “sector size”?
Edited: for all I can tell AFT can hardly be used for RAID. With an exception of RAID 1 - I cloned my previous drive, to a RAID 1 array of 2 AFT drives, understood that at this point there is no way to align partitions, then split the array up, ran WD Align on one drive, then re-built the RAID 1. Running WD Align on half full 1.5TB drive took more than 24 hours.
Needless to say just because of this “advanced thing”, for a simple task of diskspace upgrade - I spent enormous additional amount of time, and had my PC unavailable for nearly 2 days.
Maybe for a new installation, empty single drive on Vista/Windows 7 it’s acceptable, for upgrade from existing partitioned drive it’s really time-consuming. Moreover I do not see how can I set up RAID0, RAID 5 or RAID10 using AFT drives and have RAID controller handle the drive “correctly”. And I can find nowhere it stated clearly- “though shalt not use AFT for RAID”; or else “to use it in RAID do this…”
