Didn't align WD10EARS... what now?

Hello,

I installed and formatted a new WD10EARS (1T) in my PC. OS is windows XP. The drive is a secondary drive (no OS), and I already copies ~500 GB onto it.

Only then did I learn that I should have run the align program.

What are the consequences of not running that program? Is my data safe? And can I run align with a non-empty drive?

Thanks!

If you don’t align the drive on XP, it will potentially become slower and give compatibility problems. This is because XP doesn’t support 4k.