Cloning hard drive to WD advanced format

[Captain Spaulding]

Hi,

I recently upgraded a customers laptop hard drive from a WD 120GB drive to a WD 500GB drive. I imaged the original drive to an external USB drive so I also had a backup, then upgraded the drive and copied the image to the new drive.

I used EaseUS backup software and the Partition Manager software to do the above.

All good, started up the system and it booted OK, shut down and gave back to the customer etc.

The customer then calls to say the laptop is performing really badly, it takes a long time to open programs such as word (6-7 seconds) where it opened almost straight away before. The hard disk light is constantly flashing.

I get the laptop back and compare the original drives performance with the new one and the new drive is indead shockingly slow.

The old drive is WD1600BEKT the new drive WD5000BPVT. I checked the WD site and found a download "WD Align" that states if cloning a drive to the new "advanced format" I should run the program.

Just wondering if anyone else has had the same problems when cloning to advanced format and if this could indeed be the cause of the poor performance.

Thanks,
Steve

 

[FoolishTech]

Hi,

I recently upgraded a customers laptop hard drive from a WD 120GB drive to a WD 500GB drive. I imaged the original drive to an external USB drive so I also had a backup, then upgraded the drive and copied the image to the new drive.

I used EaseUS backup software and the Partition Manager software to do the above.

All good, started up the system and it booted OK, shut down and gave back to the customer etc.

The customer then calls to say the laptop is performing really badly, it takes a long time to open programs such as word (6-7 seconds) where it opened almost straight away before. The hard disk light is constantly flashing.

I get the laptop back and compare the original drives performance with the new one and the new drive is indead shockingly slow.

The old drive is WD1600BEKT the new drive WD5000BPVT. I checked the WD site and found a download "WD Align" that states if cloning a drive to the new "advanced format" I should run the program.

Just wondering if anyone else has had the same problems when cloning to advanced format and if this could indeed be the cause of the poor performance.

Thanks,
Steve

Haven't run into it yet... but this is good info. Please let us know if the performance issues clear up after the WD Align does it's thing!

 

[Martyn]

Hi,

I recently upgraded a customers laptop hard drive from a WD 120GB drive to a WD 500GB drive. I imaged the original drive to an external USB drive so I also had a backup, then upgraded the drive and copied the image to the new drive.

I used EaseUS backup software and the Partition Manager software to do the above.

All good, started up the system and it booted OK, shut down and gave back to the customer etc.

The customer then calls to say the laptop is performing really badly, it takes a long time to open programs such as word (6-7 seconds) where it opened almost straight away before. The hard disk light is constantly flashing.

I get the laptop back and compare the original drives performance with the new one and the new drive is indead shockingly slow.

The old drive is WD1600BEKT the new drive WD5000BPVT. I checked the WD site and found a download "WD Align" that states if cloning a drive to the new "advanced format" I should run the program.

Just wondering if anyone else has had the same problems when cloning to advanced format and if this could indeed be the cause of the poor performance.

Thanks,
Steve

Have a look at the data transfer rate in HDTune and see what is happening there. Maybe it needs a jumper to run correctly?

 

[Frick]

I have quite a bit of experience messing with AF drives.

You can not change the jumper after data is on the hard drive to fix the issue. The jumper must be set before formatting the drive. Even then, the jumper solution is not optimal.

You need to properly align the drive for best performance. Not having a properly aligned drive has two major issues - bad performance and excessive sector access as the drive reads the data. The excessive sector access can also lead to a shorter life span as the head is being used much more then if the drive is aligned.

Aligning a full drive can take awhile. The more data the longer it will take so be patient!

 

[Captain Spaulding]

I have quite a bit of experience messing with AF drives.

You can not change the jumper after data is on the hard drive to fix the issue. The jumper must be set before formatting the drive. Even then, the jumper solution is not optimal.

You need to properly align the drive for best performance. Not having a properly aligned drive has two major issues - bad performance and excessive sector access as the drive reads the data. The excessive sector access can also lead to a shorter life span as the head is being used much more then if the drive is aligned.

Aligning a full drive can take awhile. The more data the longer it will take so be patient!

Thanks SpeedWise! Sounds exactly like the symptoms I see, I kicked off the align, like you say it's taking a long time. Fingers crossed, will update on the result once it's done.

 

[Captain Spaulding]

WD Align just finished, but it's no better if anything a bit worse. The HD light is always on and programs such as IE are taking 10-15 secs to load.

Any Ideas?

 

[Captain Spaulding]

Also I checked the jumper, there is no jumper attached.

 

[Captain Spaulding]

Actually I started it a second time and it seems OK now, programs opening at normal speed, strange. Will wait and see what the customer thinks but it seem to be performing a lot better now its been rebooted.

 

[jbartlett323]

just so you know:
Advanced Format is literally just making the HDD use 4096 byte sectors vs. the 512 byte sectors used in the past. As such, XP doesn't like it much. Vista and 7 dont care. But since the drive is formatted before clone, it will use whatever sector size was previously used and be just fine with it...
I have used many, many advanced format drives in clone operations and have never had to reconfigure this. This format is typical in drives of 1TB or more, and is highly effective in increasing data transfer rates for very large drives. anything under 1TB should not notice much difference one way or the other....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format

 

[PWD]

I've also never had a problem like this.

Have your tried a different drive?

Have you tired using a different backup software like Acronis?

 

[Frick]

What is the OS that was cloned? How old is the laptop?

 

[othersteve]

It's also possible to use the relatively inexpensive ($30) Paragon Alignment Tool to correct this problem. It's hassle-free and pretty much risk-free as well.

 

[Captain Spaulding]

Bit more info, laptop is a Compaq CQ61 4 GB RAM, running Windows 7.

After I ran the align the customer came back and tested his programs he said it was back to normal running so it seems the align made a difference.

Looks like some backup/cloning software is advanced format aware some isn't, I guess I should have used Acronis which is.

 

[Captain Spaulding]

Just checked my email and the customer has confirmed it's running fine. It would have been nice if WD had put some kind of information in the drive packaging to let people know about it that's the first tme I've used an AF drive.

Never mind you live and learn all's good

This is going to be a problem for some people though for example:

Clonezilla:
"it won't work for 512-byte disk to "WD Advanced Format" disk.
If you want to clone 512-byte disk to "WD Advanced Format" disk, after using Clonezilla to clone it, you have to use the tool "wd align" from WD to tune that on the destination disk, or manually tune the partition table on GNU/Linux."

EaseUS:
"it will not align the partition. After the clone, please use the WD partition align tool to fix the target disk. Or you can use their clone tool to achieve your goal directly.
Sincerely,
EASEUS Support Team V"

 

[wimwauters]

This format is typical in drives of 1TB or more, and is highly effective in increasing data transfer rates for very large drives. anything under 1TB should not notice much difference one way or the other....

Indeed, but maybe WD is now using a 1TB production facility to knock out 500GB drives