Hi, i have the exact same drive. I spent a lot of time investigating how AF is supported after reading so much about people complaining about the bad performance of these drives. Many even returned their hdd after buying them. I can say that a stock install of ubuntu 11.04 doesn't correctly align the partitions. In fact this drive doesn't correctly report its physical block size (claiming 512B instead of 4096 in /sys/block/sda/queue/physical_block_size).
As said in this article (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-4kb-sector-disks/): "In practice, however, the physical block size information is spurious, at least for the first generation of Western Digital Advanced Format drives. Unfortunately, this means that disk utilities cannot properly detect the presence of such disks." In fact, while installing ubuntu with default options, it _seemed_ slower (installing, upgrading packages, etc.). I made some benchmarks to sort this out: http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1106082-MAXR-AFHDDAL95 So, while the reading speed isn't really affected, random writes were in some cases almost 3x slower. Manually partitioning the HDD with gparted and the "align to MiB" option while creating the partitions solved the problem. I think the easiest fix would be to always use parted with the "-a optimal" option when partitioning the system during an install of ubuntu. (i don't think we still really care about wasting the first MB of our HDD). Hope this helps. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/583790 Title: Ubuntu 10.04 and Western DIgital's new Advanced Format SATA drives - constant drive errors To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/583790/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
