4k sectors, how to fix XP

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

I had a drive which i RMA’d. The drive lost all its performance after a month of use. I am just today reading that WD green drives will take a 3.3x performance hit when they become “misaligned” by using certain varieties of linux and windows . I use windows XP and have the drive as a tertiary device.

Will this happen again to my drive? Does the “alignment” utility that WD provides (located here:  http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=805&lang=en ), fix this problem? will it whipe my data?

can i get my money back from WD for them shipping a clearly defectively designed drive?

thanks

2

The formatting utility below should re-align the drive without damaging the data.  However, as always, you should still back up all your data in case you lose the partition.

http://support.wdc.com/product/downloadsw.asp?sid=122

3

But I would imagine, if i jumpered the pins (6 and 7 or whatever) then i wouldn’t have to do this, correct? And it would be fine from now on?

4

Oh i just realized that this drive is EADS not EARS. i guess it was just a bad drive then, the last one i rmaed… since as i understand it, this problem\feature does not exsist on the EADS drive.

guess i had a bad drive before!