SamirD
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Posts posted by SamirD
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1 hour ago, Comos said:
I forgot to add, yes WD Formatter does a bit more,it sends probably a SCSI over USB command to the controller to switch to the 512e.Not sure if the drive is permanently switched or the controller does that automatically during power up all the time.
However when I played with my 2TB WD My Book almost 10 years ago I made a hex dump of the boot sector and it was 4Kn,so that proved that the drive itself was 4Kn.You can check the post, it's still here.
Could be a scsi to usb to change it on the drive, but that would take more time ime than the quick format that it does, so I'm thinking it is some sort of cooperation between the controller and the drive that's saved on the controller or the drive in a non-user data area.
Oh yeah, most drives today are all 4kn/512e. Very rare to find even 1 and 2TB drives today that are 512n.
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1 hour ago, Comos said:
Currently my 14TB WD Red Plus works fine with a 14TB Easystore enclousure so I assmue the 16TB WD Red Pro should aswell.The Easystore enclousure does not have encryption like the My Book has and My Book works only with supplied drives which have a differnt FW due to the encryption.Example an enclousure from a 14TB My Book didn't work with the 14TB WD Red Plus.The WD formatter is just creating/aligning the partition + quick format.All these WD drives support Advanced Format,so they are 4kn, but the controller is behaving 512e for the OS.A principle is shown in the AF White Paper, figure 2:
https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/collateral/white-paper/white-paper-advanced-format.pdfI wouldn't assume that since the Red Pro is a closer cousin to the HGST/WD enterprise drives like the 10TB one that I tried that did not work.
The WD formatter is doing more than just creating and aligning the partition as these drives while are 4kn report 512e unless changed by the WD formatter (or by other means for drives that are removed from their enclosure aka 'shucking'). But formatting outside of the enclosure has its issues as I'm working on helping a friend with several drives that are reporting as 'locked' after a 4kn format gone wrong.
The ultimate confirmation of this would be to format a drive to 4kn inside the easystore enclosure and then remove the drive and connect directly and see if the drive is still 4kn. My hunch is that it would not be and would instead report 512e (as it normally would).
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2 minutes ago, Comos said:
I guess that the 18TB will get limited to 16TB,The WDD formatter normally just creates & formats one partition.I need again to migrate my stuff from a 6TB to a new probably a 16TB WD Red Pro, but have only the controller from a 14TB EasyStore,so if it will cover all sizes then it will be good, however I can't verify that right now.It would be a good idea,if you are able to test the 14TB controller on the 18TB drive and what you see in the WD Formatter.
The controller is only translating from what I can tell because the 'format' is very quick for such a large size drive. And it's important to note that not all drives will format to 4kn. The HGST 10TB I was almost sure would work, but it didn't. And I was thinking the 6TB black wouldn't because that's basically an enterprise drive too, but it did. And ime this is more a function of the drive versus the easystore or the controller, so I think if you got a 16TB drive and paired it with your 14TB enclosure it would work fine, but may not work 4kn because of the drive, not the enclosure/controller. Yep, I'll try the 18TB with WD formatter and see what it shows and can do. I don't expect it to work though as the drive is a bit of an oddball--an enterprise drive that is out of market but still covered under US warranty. It's this drive for those that are curious:
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12 minutes ago, Comos said:
Sry for a late reply too
I don't get any email notifications, just today I saw it when I logged in.
Easystore enclousure does work fine.Im not sure if the onboard flash fw coveres all sizes upd to 16TB automatically or it's updated with every released hdd size.
Do you recall from which hdd size the enclousure come from?
I think the enclosures cover multiple sizes since after 2TB, the next logical limit is 16TB. I'm going to try it with a 18TB drive I recently obtained, but I don't know what the original drive was in any of the enclosures I got from others. I know mine that I bought and reformatted 4kn are 14TB easystore. The 8TB and 6TB were also easystore enclosures and the 8TB is a Red and the 6TB is a black. The 18TB I'm going to try is also going to be an easystore enclosure and this drive is a WD/HGST datacenter drive, which last time when I tried a 10TB HGST version of this drive, it would not change to 4kn. It will be interesting to see if the 18TB will allow me to use 4kn and if so, to make 2x MBR partitions to use the whole space or if it will simply be limited to 16TB. Either way I'll hopefully remember to post my results here. :)
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1 hour ago, XPerceniol said:
just to let you guys know ... its not a 360 issue ... same here with Serpent and Firefox 52.9.1 ?
Yep, I hit the same error message on chrome45, ff52esr, both on xp, and chrome78 on win7. I guess changing the time has become a top secret thing now that it needs proper certification to access.
I wonder what the architects of the original http protocol and Internet design would think of all this nonsense--sure puts a block on the 'openness' that was originally planned into html.
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1 hour ago, XPerceniol said:
...sing to Cyndi Lauper in spandex...
But I thought Cyndi Lauper always wore spandex? Or was that Madonna?
I'll show myself out.
Great to see how attentive the authors of these versions are to any issues.
I don't think I've seen attention like this outside of paid enterprise-level support. 
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2 hours ago, we3fan said:
Hi SamirD :), thanks I will try them.
Now when I think about it, after one carves the command line for a specific need, it should work fast and simple from cmd.You're welcome. :) If you have the same command or series of commands to run, you can also put them in a batch file or even make a multi-threaded batch file using the START command to precede certain commands.
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20 hours ago, RainyShadow said:
So, you should know that most forum communities are not very fond of
double/triple/quadriple/quintiple posting...I operate my own community and am a mod on others so am well versed on this. The only real point behind those type of rules are when forum privileges/permission escalations are post-count based. I'm sure if it's an issue here, someone in an official capacity will be in touch with me.
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4 hours ago, RainyShadow said:
Multiple quotes within a single post are possible here, you know...
You can also cut&paste quotes, images, etc. (and even move them to another post) by first clicking on their anchor on the top-left, then using the keyboard hotkeys.
Yep, and most forum platforms have allowed this for better part of a decade. But I find them too cumbersome to fool with since I read and post in multiple tabs, posting as I go.
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3 hours ago, msfntor said:
@SamirD,
SPEED-BATTLE and LiteBrite are my favorites (by far) of your suggestions. Thank you!
You're welcome! Speed-battle is so quick and easy that I usually try it on every computer at a computer store with Internet, and then am still shocked how fast my xp systems are in comparison. :D Lite brite takes some time for sure if you use the 'all' mode, but the differences between a fast computer and a slower done are really impressive. There's also an easter egg if you press ctrl-d which brings up 'dean mode' which I think is a face of the author.
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On 9/21/2021 at 3:01 PM, we3fan said:
BTW, I have a question.
If I have many .dll files, and I want to search inside all of them at the same time for a text line, which program would be best for this?
This is going to be old school, but the commands FIND and FINDSTR from the command line are my usual go to for searching files for strings. :)
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On 9/21/2021 at 10:54 AM, ArcticFoxie said:
Good deal.
I'm going to remove the fake User Agent for my next rebuilds.
People that do need them for specific needs generally know how to fake them.
Or just comment out the line from the .ini, so it's an easy uncomment for anyone that needs it. :)
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On 9/21/2021 at 3:27 AM, msfntor said:
For my page speed tests, I don't need Page Speed Monitor anymore, because I'm starting to take speed measurements again thanks to Raymond Hill, and his beatiful page: http://raymondhill.net/ublock/tiles1.html
My max results in my 360Chrome 12 and 13 builds after some restarts of this tiles1 page (with 7 must-have extensions running + memory optimization + cache cleaning): between 492 and 608 ms (average 650 to 750 ms).
Neat test. I just tried this on my portable chrome 45 on xp on my e5-2630L system and the page loaded initially in 600ms+, but then with every refresh it got less until the best I could get out of it was 261ms. If you're using this test, definitely refresh many times and see what you get.
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On 9/20/2021 at 4:19 PM, ArcticFoxie said:
Cool!
XP in React -- Haven't seen Winamp in years.
93 -- Star Wars avi - hilarious!
Yeah, seeing winamp again like that was pretty awesome.
I used to DJ with a buddy of mine back in the day with 2x winamps and laptops connected to a crossfading mixer. It was a pretty cool. Would also use a laptop in the card with a cassette adapter on long trips. :)
That starwars avi is actually available via telnet at telehack.com. They also have an ascii aquarium which I just discovered is great for keeping rdp sessions from timing out over some wan links I deal with. :D
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On 9/19/2021 at 2:52 PM, msfntor said:
- so this test doesn't mean much...
Another test to test: BMark - A HTML5 3D Benchmark: https://www.wirple.com/bmark/
I think like a lot of tests out there, the results depend on the hardware being used so they are not so good at being a test to compare system a to b versus system a pre-change and post-change. This is what I've generally used them for, especially Bmark as it is really gpu, browser, and cpu dependent.
I will usually use speed-battle.com, Bmark, the octane test, penguinmark, lite brite test, motionmark, and a few others (and now antutu) to get a general idea of how a system is running before making changes.
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1 hour ago, IXOYE said:
Neat test. I never heard of it so I tried it out on my win pen pack chrome 45 on my i7-2600k running xp that I'm RDPd into from a thin client--37260 on antutu.
I wonder what the 360 builds would do on the same platform...
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1 hour ago, ArcticFoxie said:
$10 in savings per year spanning that 13yr life span is only $130 - and you spent $800 to $1200 more than the simple model because it was "saving you money" ???
Good Luck With That lol...
Awesome example! As they say...a fool and his/her money are soon parted... :D
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What gets me is how amazingly cheap electricity can be even for high loads. I see people always dogging the Dell Poweredge 2950 and HP DL380 G5 as 'power hogs' that should be 'thrown away' and recommend some server that costs $200-$300. But when you break down the power savings between the 'newer' models and the older Dell or HP, you quickly see that 100w is like $5/mo and that it will take years to get the roi on the newer models if you're just looking at power, especially if the server is not on 24x7--but still no one gets that and these older Dell and HP servers tend to get thrown away regularly. :( Such powerful and stable xp platforms too!
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On 2/26/2021 at 2:21 AM, Comos said:
Which controller you have used? If the model is not shown in the WD Formatter ,you won't be able to reformat it to XP mode at all.
Sorry for the delayed reply! Never saw the post notification via email until now. :(
I put the drive in an easystore enclosure that I obtained from someone that didn't need it. Ironically, since this post, I have successfully formatted both an 8TB WD Red and a 6TB WD Black to 4kn and are using them with a large mbr partition. Both drives also mount perfectly when connected to my WD nas. :)
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1 hour ago, Comos said:
Correct. WD Easystore/Elemenrs have no encryption, no SED drives and probably running identical FW in the SPI Flash.
Interesting. At one point (not sure if I documented it here in this thread) I attempted to format a 10TB HGST enterprise drive to xp mode (aka 4kn) and was given a message that the drive was not supported. Interesting you were able to get a regular red drive to format, although those are more much similar to the easystore drives than the HGST that I tried.
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2 hours ago, Comos said:
I can confirm, that on a 6TB WD My Book the WD Formatter does work, I have bought that one 6 years ago and now I need an upgrade.I'll keep the WD Red as a backup and next month I'll buy the 14TB My Book and try, I'll keep you updated
The 14TB should work great.
7x FAT32 2TB partitions under MBR would be quite sweet and afaik, the record so far.
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On 11/10/2020 at 12:08 PM, dencorso said:
And there's also a report by @SamirD himself, of having changed sucessfully the apparent sector size to 4 kiB on two different 10TB Bestbuy WD Easystore drives, but IIRR, at that time he hadn't tried to format either as a single 10TB partitions...
Just before his passing, RLoew was investigating the WD Quick Formatter and he said he had figured out which SCSI commands are used for the "sector size change", but his results also pointed out to the fact that the only HDDs he found that implemented such commands were the external USB WD drives. He also found out, although that's just a curiosity, that the "sector size" might also be set to other values than 4 kiB, but that, in fact, the NT-family OSes can use only 2 kiB (besides 512 bytes and 4 kiB), Yet, his son did not yet find any material about that reseach, which, in fact, may have been all done inside a debugger, so probably only some handwritten notes or text documentation may exist, if any. And no, he also determined that XP (SP1-3) cannot handle internal 4 kiB drives, be them SATA or IDE. Only the USB stacks are able to do that. It's possible that NT-family OSes v. 6.x may do that (10 certaily does), but that's beside the point, of course, since this is the XP forum, after all!
Thank you for the great summary.
Or should I say 'obrigado'. (I used to have a really close friend originally from Recife and she taught me some of the language.)
I'm pretty sure I could have easily formatted my 10TB to a single NTFS partition after the switch to 4kn, but since my reason to switch was to enable a large MBR to be able to create multiple FAT32 partitions, I never tried formatting the whole thing NTFS.
Fascinating research on the WD formatter--I bet there is a special command that is enabled on the drives. And I think it isn't that special either as I believe some raid users on reddit have been able to run 4x shucked drives as 4kn after a format.
Yep, that's the same WD quick format I used to format my drives.
Please stay safe--we would hate to lose another forum member. I lost my dad 2 months ago to covid and it still hasn't sunk in yet.
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4 hours ago, jaclaz said:
Sure
, that is exactly where the terminology is confusing.
A 4kn disk is 4k sectored AND exposes 4k sectors.
A 512e (512AF) is 4k sectored BUT exposes 512 bytes sector.Nowadays anything bigger than - say - 500 GB or maybe 1TB is internally 4k (or at least this is what the manufacturers declare).
Actually 4kN disk are pretty much rare, compared with the much more common 512e (512AF).
jaclaz
Yep! Very much akin to the MB vs MiB issue that can be confusing as well.
I've seen that the cutoff for hardware 4k seems to be above 2TB. Most of my 2TB drives are almost all 512n.
Yeah and because the 512e drives are just emulated 512k sectors, it really shouldn't have been made to be so difficult to make a drive 4kn. I think the boot issues are what scared away most manufacturers, but those issues are almost a non-issue today except when trying to boot and run older software/OSes that need 512n.
The funny thing is, I have a maxoptix MO drive that uses 2048 sectors even back in the day. Anyone that remember mscdex remembers how those also used larger sector sizes.
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6 hours ago, jaclaz said:
I don't know, maybe it is something specific to the WD disks.
A virtual disk with 4kb sectors can be partitioned/formatted just fine in XP, at the time I put together the mentioned dual mode batch it has been tested extensively and what I could do on the virtual disk has been replicated just fine on the real disk.
It is possible that you need to make the partition table manually, though,
@SamirD
You have to make up your mind, either most drives are 4kN OR most drives are 512AF (512e).
Generally speaking, and AFAIK, disk drives up to 4-6 TB are usually 512AF, larger one are 4 kN (but not always, only as a very rough "rule of thumb") , I would say that 512AF are much more common than 4kN.
Changing sector size on SAS (please read as SCSI) is only possible on certain models of disks, and the possibilities are usually between 512 and 520 or 528 bytes/ector:
https://linux.die.net/man/8/sg_formathttps://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/how-to-reformat-hdd-ssd-to-512b-sector-size.4968/
jaclaz
I believe it is something specific to these drives inside these specific enclosures. 4kn drives can easily be partitioned and formatted--both my WD easystore drives (10/14TB? can't remember) are MBR and have multiple 2TB FAT32 partitions. They are recognized in almost every device too that can read FAT32 partitions, including nas units.
Most drives themselves are at the hardware level 4k. Most drives are sold as 512e. Hope that clears it up for you.
On SAS many users on the servethehome forum have easily moved between 512, 520, 528, and 4k. You just have to know exactly what parameters on sg_format works for what drive, and while not all drives support it, the majority do. The thread you linked to is old and most of the time the information about changing the sectors is in the individual FS or drive discussions, not in that thread.
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>2TiB external USB drive and WinXP? Of course!
in Pinned Topics regarding Windows XP
Posted
I've used 2TB FAT32s with win98se and it works although it takes quite a bit of time to read the fat and set up the drive access.