4K sector drives on SBS 2003

Topic

New Reply

One of our very old external backup drive has died and so bought 2 new Seagate 500GB replacements.

It transpires that these are the new 4K sector drives. Looking at the various MS posts, there seems to be some doubt whether these will work with SBS 2003 and/or XP. I tried to contact Seagate but they are even more difficult to contact that MS

The supplier of the drives has had no complaints as to compatibility.

Has anyone had any problems?

David

Reply | Quote

Replies

Why don’t you try formatting the drives after connecting them to the computer in question? Do a full format, not a quick format.

The format process should make them compatible with the environment you are working in, if they aren’t already compatible.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

Reply | Quote

Seems Microsoft does not support such drives in its older operating systems, see here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2510009

They recommend contacting the manufacturer to see how their drives support such systems.

It seems, however, that Seagate drives support technology that will avoid the performance degradation of misaligned partitions: http://connecteddigitalworld.com/2011/09/01/using-advanced-format-drives-in-whs-v1-seagate-smartalign/

Also here: http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/whitepaper/mb_smartalign_technology_faq.pdf

Probably you would need to check whether the specific drives you bought have SmartAlign and whether you experience any performance issues.

Reply | Quote