Is the WD2002FAEX drive (Caviar Black 2TB, 6GB/s) an Advanced Format drive (ie, using 4K sectors instead of 512 byte sectors)? I can’t find infromation on this anywhere. Thanks!
Only specific models of Caviar Green are AF, and they are listed in the Caviar Green spec sheets.
At this time, none of the Blues and none of the Blacks are AF.
This drive does support Advanced Format. I will include below several links I found and that taught me everything about the Advanced Format from the definition of it to How to setup the drive with it and download the tool to perform the alignment of the Advanced Format drive. Make sure you review every link.
At this time, none of the Caviar Blues or Caviar Blacks are AF drives.
The models that are AF are:
- WD30EZRX (Caviar Green)
- WD30EZRSDTL (Caviar Green)
- WD25EZRX (Caviar Green)
- WD25EZRSDTL (Caviar Green)
- WD20EARX (Caviar Green)
- WD20EARS (Caviar Green)
- WD15EARX (Caviar Green)
- WD15EARS (Caviar Green)
- WD10EARS (Caviar Green)
- WD7500AARS (Caviar Green)
- WD20EURS (AV-GP)
- WD15EURS (AV-GP)
- WD10EURS (AV-GP)
- WD7500AURS (AV-GP)
If the previous history with the Caviar Green drives continues, then any AF drives added to other lines will have a different model number… an AF Caviar Black would presumably not have an FAEX model, but something else, indicating it’s an AF drive.
There doesn’t appear to be any character in those model numbers that would distinguish them as AF drives. In fact the only common character is the “R” which indicates 5400 RPM, 64MB cache.
Model Number Format for WD Products:
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/other/2579-001028.pdf
Quick follow-up: I bought and received two WD2002FAEX drives and can confirm they are *not* Advanced Format drives.
I wonder when the 4k versions of the Caviar Black will be released by WD o.o
note the Acronis Alignment Tool is very Slow, makeing New partition is an Full format not quick so take long time
you only need to use the Acronis Alignment Tool if you have No windows 7 or vista systems on hand, running XP or 2003 server (both are the same os) as they do not understand 4k sectors
the tool is usefull to work out if the partition has been made correctly so usefull to run as it tell you if it was done correctly
the Acronis Alignment Tool can also convert an missalinged disk as well (but trust me its faster to just delete the parttiton and remake it on an vista or 7 system and recopy the data back as it take 5x longer to convert the disk then it does to copy it)
it is also recommended that you set the auto park to an higher number (look at the thread with 10 pages on it) as it can shorten the life of the disk due to daft 8-12 sec auto park when disk is inactive (i set all mine to 300 secs)
