Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[Anteaus]

Recently built a departmental server using three 500GB 7200rpm Barracudas. It seemed to work OK until the bulk of the data (about 20GB) was copied over, when data transfers became slow and hesitant, locking-up the desktop every time any intensive disk activity took place. After a faultfinding session that wasted a whole day, and lost half a day's work for ten users, I discovered that the cause was that these disks are Advanced Format 4k sector types. 

What I cannot understand here is that neither the disk nor the specsheet says anything about this. The user is left to try to figure out why they won't work properly with any OS other than Windows 7. I eventually discovered the truth by using a Dell diagnostic utility, which reported the disks as AF models, and with misaligned sectors. If it hadn't been for that I'd still be substituting parts to isolate the fault.

-Yet, there is an official AF logo which is supposed to be displayed on disks of this type.

So, question: WHY are these disks not properly marked as AF types?

I'm half wondering if the reason for no AF logo or wording is the bad press that AF disks have had. If so this is totally below the belt, and shouldn't be going on.

[fzabkar]

Seagate's AF drives incorporate SmartAlign technology which circumvents the read-modify-write problems caused by misalignment. You should not be seeing any performance degradation.

I suggest you run a read benchmark (eg HD Tune) against your drive. Any large dips may indicate problematic sectors.

[Cantbecanit]

I suggest you remove all Dell software (normally by fresh install) and if the problem is still there new data cables. hth.

p.s Dell load lots of **** so you have to ring them.

[Darr247]

It's too bad nobody has given you a straight answer here. 

Forget the suggested workarounds... the simple solution is don't buy Seagate drives until the company addresses this issue by labeling AF drives so we can tell them apart without having to install them first. Return them to where you bought them and ask for either your money back or drives of equal value from another manufacturer.

Buying 2 drives with identical model numbers and then being unable to setup Win7 mirroring because the physical sectors don't match is unforgivable on Seagate's part... I won't be buying any Seagate drives, nor recommending their purchase to anyone else, until the company fixes this problem, certainly.

[Carnell]

The simple answer is they're irresponsible and think they don't have to because of their emulation layer, which does not work by the way.  I still had a misaligned partition on one which I had to align. They gave the public the impression that legacy software works on them without any intervention, totally untrue.

If you ran an alignment utility on them they'd probably be okay after that.