WD SATA Drive question

Gadgetman496

I have a 1TB WD10EARS Caviar Green SATA HDD and for anyone familiar with these they have information on the label regarding the use of either a jumper or WD's alignment software.

If being used with a single partition on XP they recommend using a jumper across pins 7 & 8 which I have used.

The issue:

I put the drive with pins 7 & 8 jumped into one of those USB SATA HDD docking stations, created one x ITB partition and formatted it to NTFS, all happy



I copied quite a bit of data to the drive via the docking station, all happy

Today I fitted the drive to a new USB SATA external caddy and when I connect it it detects the drive, it shows in the device manager but it says the drive is not formatted and gives me the pop up window with the option to format the drive Wtf! :eek:

If I remove the drive from the caddy and return it to the docking station it works perfectly?

As I still have full access to the data via the docking station I'm not going to lose anything but am puzzled as to why it is being seen as unformulated when placed in the external caddy.

yoyo

gadgetman496 wrote: »

I have a 1TB WD10EARS Caviar Green SATA HDD and for anyone familiar with these they have information on the label regarding the use of either a jumper or WD's alignment software.

If being used with a single partition on XP they recommend using a jumper across pins 7 & 8 which I have used.

The issue:

I put the drive with pins 7 & 8 jumped into one of those USB SATA HDD docking stations, created one x ITB partition and formatted it to NTFS, all happy



I copied quite a bit of data to the drive via the docking station, all happy

Today I fitted the drive to a new USB SATA external caddy and when I connect it it detects the drive, it shows in the device manager but it says the drive is not formatted and gives me the pop up window with the option to format the drive Wtf! :eek:

If I remove the drive from the caddy and return it to the docking station it works perfectly?

As I still have full access to the data via the docking station I'm not going to lose anything but am puzzled as to why it is being seen as unformulated when placed in the external caddy.

Try it in the docking station again. Some of those caddies are pritty cr*p and can give you endless ammounts of headaches. I would definately reccomend using a internal drive internally, or buying a oem external drive where the drive is factory fitted.

Nick

Gadgetman496

No, It's nothing to do with the caddy and as I said in my opening post it runs fine in the docking station.

I've since read the WD Data sheet and all is explained there (RTFM)

If it is to be used internally for an XP install you need to use the jumper across pins 7 & 8.

But if it's to be used for a USB caddy you don't use the jumper but you do use the WD align software utility to correctly align it for use on random machines.

What I needed to do was transfer my data off the drive, remove the jumper, format it again & finally run the WD alignment software. It' in the caddy now and working fine across all OS's on all my machines

-

yoyo

Never heard of you needing jumpers to get SATA drives going, usually the jumpers are just used for setting compatibility options. Glad you got it sussed anyways

Nick

Gadgetman496

yoyo wrote: »

Never heard of you needing jumpers to get SATA drives going, usually the jumpers are just used for setting compatibility options. Glad you got it sussed anyways

Nick

Yeah, those drives work out of the box for 7, in fact they work out of the box for XP too (though WD reckon you won't get the best from the drive on XP without the jumper) but it must have something to do with the way WD are using alignment software to set the drives up to increase capacity? I read somewhere that this sort of setup needed to be used to break the 3TB barrier or something like that.

fionny

I havent had to set jumpers on a hard disk in like forever... certainly never did it for any windows xp upwards machines... most sata drives i have dont even have jumper pins on them.

yoyo

gadgetman496 wrote: »

Yeah, those drives work out of the box for 7, in fact they work out of the box for XP too (though WD reckon you won't get the best from the drive on XP without the jumper) but it must have something to do with the way WD are using alignment software to set the drives up to increase capacity? I read somewhere that this sort of setup needed to be used to break the 3TB barrier or something like that.

Thats true, XP doesn't support the new "Advanced Format" drives out of the box I don't think, you also need to align SSDs to work optimally in XP. Tbh hardly suprising a 10+ year old OS not supporting modern hardware well :P .

Nick

Gadgetman496

fionny wrote: »

I havent had to set jumpers on a hard disk in like forever... certainly never did it for any windows xp upwards machines... most sata drives i have dont even have jumper pins on them.

Well this drive is new and it has jumper pins

The manufactures data sheet is where I got those instructions and I guess WD know what they're talking about regarding their "Advanced Format".

yoyo

gadgetman496 wrote: »

Well this drive is new and it has jumper pins

The manufactures data sheet is where I got those instructions and I guess WD know what they're talking about regarding their "Advanced Format".

Advanced format isn't just a WD thing, the new high capacity drives are different in how they allocate the data, see here.

Nick

Gadgetman496

yoyo wrote: »

Advanced format isn't just a WD thing, the new high capacity drives are different in how they allocate the data, see here.

Nick

Oh! I know that it's not just WD yoyo, what I meant was that if WD recommend the use of a jumper in certain scenarios you would have to accept that they know their own product & accept their advice.

yoyo

gadgetman496 wrote: »

Oh! I know that it's not just WD yoyo, what I meant was that if WD recommend the use of a jumper in certain scenarios you would have to accept that they know their own product & accept their advice.

All SATA hard disks I've come accross have jumper positions. In most cases use of them is not needed, but depending on the drive the jumpers help set different configurations for whatever purpose. If WD say for XP os you should use a jumper config then you should . WD also have a hard disk alignment tool which you should use for XP installs, as XP doesn't understand this "format" so won't work optomally with default config.
Allot of commotion has being going on with regards to these new drives, all it means is that more space can be used without needing more platters or configorations I think. My Samsung 2tb drive is a AF one, although doesn't need jumpers config for Windows 7 I'm not sure about XP (Never needed to check ) .

Nick