Western Digital EARS

[open-6]

Can I use an EARS hard drive with an external enclosure or a dock station? My OS is Vista, but I don't intend to install the hard drive in the case. Will this cause any performance issue?

[_dangtx_]

vista and above should be fne(i.e. no need for alignement as for xp on some drives)

[Zero82z]

Are you talking about installing the OS on an external drive and booting from that? If so, then no, you can't do that. But if you just want to use the drive in an external enclosure for data storage, then it shouldn't be a problem.

[gingerbee]

^^^ what about e-sata i use it to boot drives all the time? outside of the basic's i really like the ears they run very cool and fast for 5900rpm drive

[open-6]

Originally Posted by Zero82z

Are you talking about installing the OS on an external drive and booting from that? If so, then no, you can't do that. But if you just want to use the drive in an external enclosure for data storage, then it shouldn't be a problem.

No, I just want to use the drive in an external enclosure for data storage. Will the WD TV or any other system not using Vista or Windows 7 have problems reading it?

[AkG]

Shouldnt be any problems. I do it with a Asus media player and a Patriot Box Office. Plug it into your system, its seen as another hdd, drop the files to it. Safely disconnect, shut down. Plug into the media player. Turn it on...will be seen as a drive. Enjoy viewing your [data].

[Zero82z]

Originally Posted by open-6

No, I just want to use the drive in an external enclosure for data storage. Will the WD TV or any other system not using Vista or Windows 7 have problems reading it?

You should check to make sure that the WD TV supports reading from drives using the NTFS file system, but other than that, it should work fine.

[bojangles]

I think he's wondering more about the 4KB sectors of the EARS drive. If you run it in Vista you shouldn't have problems. Once it's formatted you're good to go.

[gingerbee]

Originally Posted by bojangles

I think he's wondering more about the 4KB sectors of the EARS drive. If you run it in Vista you shouldn't have problems. Once it's formatted you're good to go.

ya i know i just figured that he would read what it says right on the drive but you know what they say about assumption's

[technix]

If you have Windows 7 or Vista, then you are set. It has to do with partition alignment of the drive. As I understand it, these 4kb sector drives is that they just need to be aligned properly in order for them to work properly. Those two operating systems can do it but XP cannot without additional software, one is the WD Align software (from Paragon, actually) which will make the drive compatible with XP's NTFS. It just aligns the drive so the sector values are arranged in a multiple of 8. This especially applies to the starting sector. I think WD's utility does it so the starting sector is 64.

Anyway, it's the limitation of XP not being able to do this. Once the partition or partitions are aligned, then XP can use it without performance penalties. The formatting is something different but I assume Windows 7 and Vista will align the partitions when it does a format.

I suspect the WD Alignment software (Paragon) aligns it as 4096 byte sectors and since that's a multiple of 8 (512 x 8), XP will read it as EIGHT 512 byte sectors or whatever. I probably didn't explain it accurately but I think it's along those lines.

EDIT: I might even be shooting up the wrong tree but I don't have a EARS drive to test...