I’m looking at getting a new hard drive for my server, and there’s a reasonable price on a Western Digital model that includes their new “Advanced Format” technology. Some of the reviews (and some Googling) suggest that Advanced Format could end up with screwy partition alignments or some such that result in a nasty performance hit, and that such problems may or may not exist when using Linux (which my server does). I’m finding that this is all just a bit over my head, so I hope somebody can just short-circuit all of this for me: whatever the potential problem with Advanced Format is, will I run into it running the drive on 64-bit the latest version of Ubuntu? If so, what do I do to make the problem go away?
Is this the new bigger sector size? If so you won’t run into any problems on any Windows version, not even XP. The theoretical performance hits did not manifest in actual benchmarks.
Uh, but I don’t have any idea about Linux, sorry.
We’ve used EARS drives on numerous machines with no problem that I could tell from the tests I’ve run. XP SP3 and 7 only though, so Linux may have some surprises.