Gadgetory

so the weather is finally good enough that we are back in our outdoor unboxing location yay and to celebrate the occasion we are going to be unboxing another Western digital one terabyte hard drive yay no I'm just kidding there's something special about this this is a Western Digital one terabyte green hard drive but the thing that you should notice about it is besides having a 64 Meg cash which is thumbs up it is a WD 10 years so the EA RS in the part number means that this is an advanced format drive now what advanced format means is that this drive uses four kilobyte sectors instead of 512 byte sectors what that means in layman's terms is that the drive is able to in the future with this technology achieve much greater data densities than a more traditional Drive so why don't we get started with the unboxing or unbagging as it were of this Western Digital green ears drive so there's the drive itself and inside we will find oh I'm very fond of these do not eat okay silica gel don't eat that please thank you these are not little um like bubble key things that don't have them okay so let's look at the drive physically first so it's a pretty typical three and a half inch drive you got your three mounting holes on the one side you got nothing here you have three mounting holes on the other side on the bottom you will find your pretty standard looking PCB with two mounting holes on either side and then at the back you will find a standard SATA power as well as a SATA to interface with some jumper pins and whatnot now I want to talk a little bit about it what Advanced Format means now Advanced Format won't bother newer operating systems like Mac OS X Vista or Windows 7 but if you are running and I'm just going to put this up here so that everyone can see it if you are running Windows XP with a multi partition or you are using cloning software you need to use the WD align software available at WWDC comm /a DV format so that's advanced format and then you will be able to use that tool to make the drive perform properly because if you don't the partition will not be aligned properly with the new sector size and the drive will perform very very poorly okay now if you are running Windows XP with a single partition it's as simple as setting jumper seven to eight prior to installation or using the WD line software now they recommend using the WD align software rather than the jumper just because it's a more complete solution but the jumper will work if you just want a grab and go sort of way to get this running right out of the box all other OS configurations the drive is ready for use as is like I mentioned before so Windows Vista Windows 7 OS X don't even think about it whereas with Windows XP and you remember that's a seven eight year old operating system at this point it didn't know that we were going to make this radical change so with Windows XP make sure you either set jumper seven and eight or use the WD line software thanks for checking out my unboxing and I think we're done now