SeaTools

[Poppy]

Hi everyone,

I am wondering how safe would it be to use Seatools for DOS (latest version) to set the LBA manually for a drive from another manufacturer?

I have a large backup drive that I just want to shrink down to 40GB so it's easier to manage with the current primary Seagate drive. The drive in question is from WD and I was wondering can I just use Seatools for this purpose? I have used Seatools already to set the size for the Seagate drive and just want to check if the above is okay. I'm aware that different vendors implement things differently, so thought I might just ask first.

Thanks!     

[TRoss]

Hello,

It should not work with another manufacturers device. You might check the WD site. I believe they should have some utility to do this as well.

[Poppy]

Thanks TRoss.

Whilst it does detect the WD drive, I'll use the official support tool from WD to do the WD drive. The Seagate one set it perfectly for the Seagate drive, so i figured it might be a universal tool and would save me burning another CD
 
Quite a handy feature, despite most people probably thinking that it's crazy, "why would you want to set the drive size smaller?" - a perfect use for small business machines where capacity isn't a huge requirement, but performance is. Afterall, the first 40GB of a drives platter(s) is incredibly fast. Later on when the drive is decommissioned, woop - remove the lba setting and you've got a handy 250GB drive!