CF-30 (and probably others) and Advanced Format (or 4K)

So I've been in the market to upgrade to the 30, which I have a pair (a Mark I and a Mark II respectively) that I got over the last few weeks because they were at a reasonable price and both had burners and caddies.

One of the things that I totally forgot was that newer hard drives of the Hitachi kind are all 4K/Advanced Format only but they do support 512e. From what I recall this is 4K physical sectors that support 512 byte per sector emulation.

From what all I can understand, I would rather not open the drive I bought without making sure it's compatible with the Mark II, but here's the facts I've understood. I'm more comfortable with using Windows XP on the machine, but in the future I may or may not experiment with Win7 on a 40GB drive.

-The raw AHCI in theory will work in recognizing the drive under Windows XP.
-The Intel Rapid Storage Matrix cannot be used with those drives (as it is only supported in Vista and newer for RST 9.6).
-I'm assuming the BIOS of the 30 will read the full 1TB I have, I know it reads a WD Black 500GB just fine (but that drive was made in '11, I don't know if it supports AF or not)
-To align the drive I would need to partition the drive with a third party utility such as Acronis.

I feel like I am missing something in particular, so feel free to add or correct what I'm getting wrong.

 

Well it should see it but I don't run big drives any more. My max drive is a 256GB SSD and every thing else goes on my 2TB external drive. My 30 runs very fast with a SSD but with the old spin drives very slow.

 

What he said ^^^
:thumbsup:

Well in my humble opinion..it's SATA and should be backward compatible.
Just remember a CF30 is SATA 1. Anyone who has run an SATA 2 or 3 drive only gets SATA 1 speeds.

You may need to contact the drive manufacturer to be sure..

 

The thing about SATA III speeds is that if the hardware can only read or write so fast then the additional bandwidth over a single SATA channel is kind of moot. For all practical purposes if a CF-30 can already read a 1TB with no problem I don't see why it shouldn't take a 512e 1TB (I was wondering if people tested the CF-30 to go that high, I suppose was my original question). I wasn't sure if there was any sort of limitation on that model, or something.

I'm not really much of an SSD person. I have a few SSDs in computers but they're all SLC and for going around conventions and events I like to only have to keep track of the computer.

 

I found this info..In a nutshell, You probably need to use software provided by the drive manufacturer to re align it.

Among the Advanced Format initiatives undertaken by the Long Data Sector Committee, methods to maintain backward compatibility with legacy computing solutions were also addressed. For this purpose, several categories of Advanced Format devices were created.
512e

Many host computer hardware and software components assume the hard drive is configured around 512-byte sector boundaries. This includes a broad range of items including chipsets, operating systems, database engines, hard drive partitioning and imaging tools, backup and file system utilities as well as a small fraction of other software applications. In order to maintain compatibility with legacy computing components, many hard disk drive suppliers support Advanced Format technologies on the recording media coupled with 512-byte conversion firmware. Hard drives configured with 4096-byte physical sectors with 512-byte firmware are referred to as Advanced Format 512e, or 512 emulation drives.
Potential areas using 512-byte-based code

The translation of the 4096-byte physical format to a virtual 512-byte increment is transparent to the entity accessing the hard disk drive. Read and write commands are issued to Advanced Format drives in the same format as legacy drives. However, during the read process, the Advanced Format hard drive loads the entire 4096-byte sector containing the requested 512-byte data into memory located on the drive. The emulation firmware extracts and re-formats the specific data into a 512-byte chunk before sending the data to the host. The entire process typically occurs with little or no degradation in performance.

The translation process is more complicated when writing data that is either not a multiple of 4K or not aligned to a 4K boundary. In these instances, the hard drive must read the entire 4096-byte sector containing the targeted data into internal memory, integrate the new data into the previously existing data and then rewrite the entire 4096-byte sector onto the disk media. This operation, known as read-modify-write (RMW), can require additional revolution of the magnetic disks, resulting in a perceptible performance impact to the system user. Performance analysis conducted by IDEMA and the hard drive vendors indicates that approximately five to ten percent of all write operations in a typical business PC user environment may be misaligned and a RMW performance penalty incurred.[18][19]

When using Advanced Format drives with legacy operating systems, it is important to realign the disk drive using software provided by the hard disk manufacturer. Disk realignment is necessary to avoid a performance degrading condition known as cluster straddling where a shifted partition causes filesystem clusters to span partial physical disk sectors. Since cluster to sector alignment is determined when creating hard drive partitions, the realignment software is used after partitioning the disk. This can help reduce the number of unaligned writes generated by the computing ecosystem. Further activities to make applications ready for the transition to Advanced Format technologies are being spearheaded by the Long Data Sector Committee and the hard disk drive manufacturers.[

 

As far as size goes...
here are some search results to sort through.

https://www.google.com/search?num=2....0..0.0....0...1c..47.serp..0.0.0.n5V7waPFik4


Here is a direct answer about 1TB drives..
http://forum.notebookreview.com/panasonic/639568-cf-30-what-should-i-look.html#post8346030

 

Well so far in order to get the "Intel RST 9.6" requirement I'm using the Intel Storage Matrix (I'm used to calling them that on my ThinkPad) driver and software for the CF-31 Mark II Standard/Performance since my understanding is that both the raw driver and the RST need to be the same version and V7 isn't going to cut it to what I've understood.

 

Might use Western Digital's Advanced Format Alignment Tool:

WD Support / Downloads

It should work on Hitachi drives too, since WD bought Hitachi

 

With the wayback machine I was able to nab Hitachi's official tool, but I'm sure either will work.