The Facts: 4K Advanced Format Hard Disks

Windows 7 Testing Setup

• Intel Core i7 920 (operating at 2.83GHz – 21x135MHz) - TurboBoost and power saving states disabled.
  
• Gigabyte X58A-UD7 motherboard (Intel X58 with ICH10R southbridge, USB 3.0 and Marvell SATA 6Gbps)
  
• 3x 2GB Corsair XMS PC-1333 memory
  
• Nvidia GeForce GT 240 512MB
  
• PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750W PSU
  
• Windows 7 Home Premium x86-64
  
• Nvidia Forceware 196.21 WHQL
  
• Stock Windows AHCI driver (msahci.sys)

This is our standard Windows 7 test system that we use to test all hard disks and SSDs.

Windows XP Test Setup

• Intel Core i5 750 (operating at 2.66GHz – 20x133MHz) - TurboBoost and power saving states disabled.
  
• Biostar TH55XE motherboard (Intel H55 PCH)
  
• 2x 2GB Kingston 1,600MHz DDR3 memory
  
• ATI Radeon HD 4530 512MB graphics card
  
• PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750W PSU
  
• Windows XP Home 32-bit
  
• ATI Radeon Catalyst 10.3 WHQL

Setup Profiles:

Because we're unable to fit all the information in the graphs, we've had to create the profiles that reference different system states used in the graphics for our Windows XP tests:


We have compared whether using the '+1' 7/8 jumper makes a noticeable difference or not, and we have tested the effects of multiple partitions - testing each partition after the WD Align software had run. We also compared all this to a standard 512B sector size EADS disk with a single partition.