Western Digital brings Advanced Format to Caviar Green

[onethreehill]

For quite some time now, mechanical hard drives have stored data in 512-byte chunks called sectors. That sector size worked for lower capacity points, but as areal densities rise, it's become increasingly inappropriate for new drives. As a result, the industry has decided to transition to a 4KB sector size dubbed Advanced Format.

So-called legacy formatting schemes sandwich each 512-byte sector between Sync/DAM and ECC blocks that handle data address marking and error correction, respectively—and also take up space. You still need those blocks with Advanced Format, but only every 4KB rather than every 512 bytes, which translates to a dramatic reduction in overhead. This approach allows Advanced Format to make more efficient use of a platter's available capacity, and Western Digital expects it to boost useful storage by 7-11%, depending on the implementation. Current 500GB/platter products stand to see an increase in useful capacity of about 10%, which is really quite impressive.

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/18115

[Smartidiot89]

I am no expert, but shouldn't this give a performanceboost aswell?

[Machinus]

i think it will mean smaller read times, but it seems like the bigger benefit will come from the controllers which will no longer have to address such small blocks...

[has33]

Ahh, this will improve the stats of my 1Gbit seedbox. ATM, the only thing that hurts my Up/Down speeds is the HDD .. even after assigning 2GB of sys RAM to the Disk Cache. The reason is the # of blocks in the pieces .. each pieces is 16KB and ATM.

With the transition to 4KB from 512B, the Sync/DAM would be quicker (4/piece compared to 16/piece, I guess) and I'll get more space

I do ve 2 x 1TB WD Caviar Green (in RAID 0), ATM. I'll make sure they get the new Caviar Green, as n when its out.

[Frank M]

Nice.
Though I'd be even happier if they made this backwards compatible, i.e.
release updated firmwares for older drives, too.

[D749]

I'm glad I didn't already build my RAID 10 storage array. I was going to go with WD Blacks, for speed, but perhaps I'll use the new Greens.

[[XC] Synthetickiller]

I want to know two things...

What are the results of a bench vs other drives...

How quiet is this?

All my WD drives (excluding raptors) are fairly slow and loud compared to my samsungs which I can't even tell are one unless I put my ear to the drive.

[Eastcoasthandle]

I am no expert, but shouldn't this give a performanceboost aswell?

Well using 4K instead of 512 bytes sectors normally allows the hard drive to operate within it's rated specs as far as speed is concerned. Which is why people use it even though it uses more space. We would need to see benchmark results to find out if there is any performance improvements beyond what they are rated for. But honestly, if it did improve specs for the harddrive not only would they charge more but it would be their marketing theme IMO. Also, what about their Caviar Black Series? I mean that's their better model. Shouldn't they be doing this to their Black hard drives?

[XS Janus]

1. So this will be a seamless transition on current models or can we expect drives?
2. Can we expect any compatibility issues with Raid controllers and stuff like that?
3. How will these work in Raid with current ones?

[highoctane]

Also, what about their Caviar Black Series? I mean that's their better model. Shouldn't they be doing this to their Black hard drives?

Thats what I was wondering, why introduce this on a slower cheaper green drive rather than improve the higher end drives where they can make more money and capitalize on any performance gains.

[zalbard]

Thats what I was wondering, why introduce this on a slower cheaper green drive rather than improve the higher end drives where they can make more money and capitalize on any performance gains.

This makes me doubt if the performance improvement is any significant.
Probably not.

[Eastcoasthandle]

I'm starting to believe this is nothing more then marketing. It was obvious they needed to improve yields on their Caviar Green and I'm speculating that this was part of whatever problems they fixed. Now they are marketing it as the "new and improved Caviar Green!". It probably won't be better then the Black because if it did they would be using it for the Black and charging a higher price for it. But I'm just speculating on all of this. We still have to wait for benchmark results.

[[XC] Oj101]

This makes me doubt if the performance improvement is any significant.
Probably not.

Bigger blocks = fewer reads = lower power consumption? My guess.

[ecidious]

I'm starting to believe this is nothing more then marketing. It was obvious they needed to improve yields on their Caviar Green and I'm speculating that this was part of whatever problems they fixed. Now they are marketing it as the "new and improved Caviar Green!". It probably won't be better then the Black because if it did they would be using it for the Black and charging a higher price for it. But I'm just speculating on all of this. We still have to wait for benchmark results.

Before you go off completely freaking out, WD has been introducing every advancement (this, higher density, etc) on the green drives since their release. It's easier to make things work on slower spindle speeds.

[Eastcoasthandle]

Before you go off completely freaking out, WD has been introducing every advancement (this, higher density, etc) on the green drives since their release. It's easier to make things work on slower spindle speeds.

Nah, it' nothing like that. I'm simply curious as to why they choose Cavair Green and would like to see if that improves performance or if it's part of any fixes for the hard drive.

[alfaunits]

Bigger blocks = fewer reads = lower power consumption? My guess.

I believe the total area used for 512 bytes of data is ~528 bytes. For 4096 byte blocks, this would probably go to ~4152 or maybe the same @~4112. Either way you can see how minimal this is overall. 1/32 vs. 1/256. That's 3% vs 0.4%. That's the speed increase we can expect from this solely.

However, I imagine some latencies will go down a bit. Heatwise, again, that's the difference we would see. At 5W that Green uses.. not important.

Still, this is gain that WD gains without much work so it's good nonetheless.

(I might be wrong about the above numbers of additional ECC area but I doubt it's much greater)

[alfaunits]

All my WD drives (excluding raptors) are fairly slow and loud compared to my samsungs which I can't even tell are one unless I put my ear to the drive.

I got 8 WD20EADS (2TB Greens) in an external DAS case (connected to Areca 1280). I don't hear them at all. The rest of the system are SSDs only. The case has 4 fans though because the freakin' RAID cards heat bloody much.

[Serra]

Nice. It should mean at least a very slight performance boost, presuming this is 4096-byte logical with 4096-byte physical sectors rather than 512-byte logical over 4096-byte physical (which, yes, did/does exist). It should be the former though.

The big saver is that you can now pack a bit more data into those faster outer cylinders. For a 512-byte platter you have 192bytes of ECC overhead over 4096 bytes; for a 4096-byte platter you have 100. The savings is 92 bytes/4096 bytes (~2.24%). Along with that there will also be some slightly relaxed processing requirements on the drive (I wouldn't worry about this affecting anything as it's a bit of a misnomer) and fewer bytes given up to gap/preamble. Overall let's say it save you about 2.5-3% in space. The actual speed boost comes where the slowest 3% of your data can now move up a bit, but how much speed you come out with in the end is questionable and subject to math I really don't want to go into.

The annoying thing is that the increase is small enough I don't think you could conclusively show it in tests these days, but the math says it should be there.


Edit: On highly fragmented drives this could, I suppose, be beneficial... but you really shouldn't see 512-byte fragmentation anyway these days.

[JohnZS]

Would be nice if they were to release this for my WD Velociraptor 300GB
John

[Smartidiot89]

Also, what about their Caviar Black Series? I mean that's their better model. Shouldn't they be doing this to their Black hard drives?

Lately it seems that Western Digital announces new stuff for the Green series first for some reason... Atleast that was the case with 2GB drives

[stevecs]

About friggen time! Now if they can add in DIX/DIF (4160 byte sectors) this would be a good thing. Having been talked about for what 4-5 years that this was 'coming' it's LONG overdue.

[onethreehill]

Is this the drive?
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=763

[Starscream]

Is this the drive?
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=763

Ya, they wil have 64MB (other Green series only have 32MB) cache and will be model EARS.

[eric66]

so are these green series good or what ? i want to buy Hd with tera or higher capacity question is which brand has better drive ?

[XS Janus]

so are these green series good or what ? i want to buy Hd with tera or higher capacity question is which brand has better drive ?

Even though this is not the place to ask that, cause it could lead to broad discussion: Yes the GP drives are great and well worth buying.


-Now, I hope someone will check soon if these new drives, support TLER, through wdtler utility
What is their formatted capacity, now?

-edit: its 1953,51GB, looks the same to EADS and FYPS to me...