Windows Server 2003 4K sector size

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arges86

arges86

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Aug 31, 2008
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I'm running a WHS v1 which uses Windows Server 2003 (I know its old, but it still works).
The machine runs great for daily backups and media storage. Besides the ftp server and playing around with an IIS that's all I really use it for.
I've recently added a Western Digital Red 2TB HDD to the system to replace a failing Seagate 7200.11 and everything seems to be working fine.
I know Sever 2003 doesn't support Advanced Format disks with 4K sectors. According to this old MS article I should use Diskpart to manually change the offset.

My question is, is it worth it? Will I see any difference in performance with a network drive if its not strictly compatible with the OS's 512 byte sector size? Will this cause any reliability issues?
 
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If the OS causes a misalignment, then yes, you can notice a performance problem. Exactly how much is difficult to say because it depends on the workload, but it's an easy thing to keep fixed right, so why not make sure it's proper? If you really want to know, then the best way to find out would be to benchmark the drive with a poor lineup and then with a proper lineup.

As for reliability, I don't expect any issues. The OS will either work with the drive from the start or it won't. The drive shouldn't fail early as a result of this.
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blazorthon

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Sep 24, 2010
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If the OS causes a misalignment, then yes, you can notice a performance problem. Exactly how much is difficult to say because it depends on the workload, but it's an easy thing to keep fixed right, so why not make sure it's proper? If you really want to know, then the best way to find out would be to benchmark the drive with a poor lineup and then with a proper lineup.

As for reliability, I don't expect any issues. The OS will either work with the drive from the start or it won't. The drive shouldn't fail early as a result of this.
 
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arges86

arges86

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OK, that's mostly what I was wondering. Since Windows Home Server still uses Windows Drive Extender for storage pooling, its difficult to determine the speeds of any single drive in the pool.
I hope changing the alignment wont mess up the data already written to the disk, since I can't exactly backup the 4TB volume its apart of.
 
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