2 WD10EADS drives 1 with 512B/sector 1 with 4096B/sector

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

As the subject line says, I realize even drives purchased together are likely from very different lots.However, ALL of the documentation says that the EARS are the only advanced format drives. With that in mind, even though I know the newer drives need care in partitioning to align them right, I didn’t think I needed to with either of these. Anyone have any idea if WD screwed up? Just neglected to mention that retrofitted some EADS boards with the new advanced format platters and diddled with the firmware? Whats the deal? Not really mad, but I’d like maybe a f/w update or a public acknowledgement that these drives do indeed have the 512/4096 translation going on.

If anyone cares, I have run hdparm etc and can gladly rerun it or anything else to get any info you want. 

2

How do you know one has 4KB sectors?

3

First clue was performance was really bad on the one EADS and not the other. After some digging and using partitioning tools, I tried hdparm -i /dev/sdb     (sda is hitachi, sdc is the other EADS)

along with hdparm -I /dev/sdb

in the output it shows that the drive has 512 logical sectors but 4096 physical.

Also, both utilities provided by Western Digital for aligning 4k drives detect and support the operation on this drive, but list the other EADS as “not supporting alignment”