I bought a Gateway system that had a WD15EARS installed so I bought another one and I was going to set up a RAID 1 mirror. Win 7 Pro was telling me that the drives must have the same sector size. So I used the installed Intel Storage Manager to check the drives and I see that the newly installed drive shows up as having Physical Sector size of 512 bytes and Logical Sector size of 512 bytes while the drive that came in the system shows as having 4096 bytes as the Physical Sector size.
How is this possible? Can I format or reformat the new drive to have a 4096 Physical Sector size? Why doesn’t it already?
The physical drive sector size has nothing to do with the file system formatting and the file system cluster size ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/140365/en-us)..) The physical sector size is the size internally used by the drive and can’t be changed. Both of your drives use a physical sector size of 4K, one of them just reports a wrong value. So the different reportings should not effect the possibility to create a RAID system with the two drives. You just have to make sure you formatted the two drives with the same cluster size. See also here regarding the different sector size reportings: http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/Physical-Sector-Size-different-between-WD20EARS-00MVWB0-and/td-p/218226
I get this when I try to add a mirror in the Disk Management console. What is this complaining about?
Uhh, sounds strange. Can you post the output of ‘fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo driveletter:’ of both of your drives?
If the disk management console really wants both drives to have the same physical sector size then you unfortunately won’t be able to create a software RAID using the windows tools.
And why is one of them reporting a wrong physical sector size?
What is the difference between the 00MVWB0 and the 22MVWB0?
Regarding the ‘why’ - well you have to ask WD why they implemented it this way in some of their drives. Maybe a firmware update could fix this but I doubt WD will ever release one.
I can’t tell you the exact difference on a hardware level but they definitely do have different firmware versions.
One addition: assuming that you’re using Win7 and have the patch KB982018 installed then removing this patch could help you creating the RAID. Because Windows will then no longer be able to detect the different physical sector size values.
But I dunno how Win will behave if your RAID already exists and you install the mentioned patch. If you give it a shot then you should reinstall this patch and see if your system still works (backup first!) afterwards since it will be part of the next SP and I doubt you want to lose the possibility to install Service Packs.
I bought two idential drives for a RAID 1, one failed in a couple months, so I RMAed to WD and got a recertified drive back which has the same model number but reports this error when I try to configure a RAID 1 with the other drive. If two drives have the same model number, shouldn’t the physical sector size be the same? Or do you think this drive might be mislabled? It’s pretty frustrating to have a drive fail and now be unable to use these in RAID… it’s not like I bought two different drives and expected them to work, WD seems to be at fault.
