Linea Recta wrote:
"Paul" schreef in bericht

Honesty is hard to find.

Brand new drives, can come formatted. So that part is not unusual.
But the power on hours would be set to zero at the factory, before
the drive shipped.

I don't know about refurbished drives though. For example, if
you got a warranty return from Seagate, do they reset the SMART
on those ? I don't know the answer to that. Check the label
and see if it says "Refurbished" on it somewhere.



On the web shop it doesn't say anything about 'refurbished'. It even
looks new. Today I had them on the phone about this, and the guy told me
it was a refurbished drive indeed. He said I could have known because it
says 'warranty 6 months' on the web shop. They offered me money back,
but I decided to keep it and get 5 euro's off because of the unclear
conditions. I do hope it lives longer than 6 months though...
The drive performs very fast, in fact much faster than the existent C:
drive.

Enjoy your 512 byte physical/512 byte logical drive :-)

That's the "old fashioned" type.

I have about four 500GB drives here, SATA drives. I suspect,
based on behavior, they all have 4K sectors underneath.
Although one of them claims to be 512 byte physical/ 512 byte logical,
it has the same crappy behavior as the latest drives I got.
(Doesn't run "smooth" as it should. Transfer rate is like
"waves of the ocean". Up n' down until you're seasick.)

The latest drives are 4096 byte physical/512 byte logical,
otherwise known as "512e" or 512 byte emulated drives. Seagate
does read/modify/write operations, so at the user level, it
still looks like a 512 byte sector that an older OS can use. But
such a scheme exacts a performance penalty.

Western Digital, I think they make 4096 physical/4096 logical,
which works seamless on Windows 7 with patch, but needs
"alignment" elsewhere.

I've been experimenting the last few days, trying to get the
4096/512 drive to behave better. And so far I haven't succeeded.
I crudely aligned a FAT32 partition, using a change to reserved
sector count, and that didn't do squat for me. Much to my surprise.
I'm left to conclude, that the cache handling inside the hard
drive, is about as effective as SMARTDRV from DOS days - it
needs to dump the cache at regular intervals, causing a several
second delay until more files can be handled.

I haven't cracked the performance puzzle yet.

The fact you've got a 512/512 drive, is something to be happy about.
I'd be doing a happy dance around the computer right now, if
that's what I had in front of me. Mainly because I could just
use it, and no more experiments would be required.

Paragon makes an alignment utility, but they want $30 for it.
My problem with that, is I'm particular about who I give
my credit card details to. And I won't be dealing direct with
Paragon, because they're in Germany as far as I know. The last
time I tried to buy software from Germany, my card was declined,
and I got a phone call later from the credit card company. That
kinda takes the fun out of it. At the time that happened,
I actually ended up getting double billed, and it took forever
to resolve. So I'd just like to buy from someone who
uses a North American credit card processor.

Paul