Windows Home Server and Advanced Format Hard Disks

There have been lots of discussions, rumours, musings and occasional panic around advanced format hard drives and Windows Home Server. Microsoft have issued a KB article talking about it.

We also posted an article a few weeks ago about the future of hard drives.

What has been surprising is that we have all read stories, posts and comments on different sites where people have said they have experience problems with the drives, and then there are the people who say they haven’t had problems.

Like a lot of new technologies, people need to understand what it is, and what it means. For example, it is not surprising that Windows Home Server, based on a 7 year old operating system doesn’t understand and doesn’t support brand new advanced format hard drives.

The best advice I can give, and have read is that you should carefully look at the drives you are buying to make sure they are fully compatible with whatever system you are using.

Are you using any of the new advanced format hard drives anywhere? Have you had issues? Let us know your thoughts on the subject.

Here is the full article:

To improve the speed and storage efficiencies of hard disk drives, manufacturers are moving to a new technology known as “Advanced Format sector disk”. This technology requires the hard disk to be formatted and aligned in 4K sectors instead of the traditional 512 byte sectors that is currently used by most software. This article details the compatibility of these hard disk drives with Windows Home Server.

This article describes the two scenarios that can affect your installation of Windows Home Server. Some manufacturers provide alignment tools for their products; however these tools are not always compatible with the platform and technologies upon which Windows Home Server is built therefore we cannot provide support. You may consult hard disk manufacturers for their recommended solutions on adapting Advanced Format disks with various environments.

The next version of Windows Home Server will support Advanced Format disk in 512 emulated mode from most manufacturers and supports disks larger than 2 terabytes as storage disk, however Extensible Firmware Interface BIOS is required for the System Disk otherwise capacity exceeding 2 terabytes will not be utilized.

Scenario A: Server Disk

You install or replace your disk in your Home Server as a system disk or storage pool with an Advanced Format sector disk.
You will experience performance degradation when using Advanced Format disk in your Home Server v1 for Server Backup, Storage Pool, or System Disk because the disks are formatted and aligned in a way Windows Home Server is not compatible with.

Recommendation Windows Home Server v1: Do not use Advanced Format disks in your Windows Home Server v1.

Windows Home Server ‘Vail’: Upcoming Windows Home Server codename ‘Vail’ will support Advanced Format disks as server disks.

Scenario B: Client Computers

You replace or restore a client computer with Advanced Format drives.
If you replace or restore a hard disk on a client computer with an Advanced Format disk drive, you should not see any issues with Windows Home Server functionality such as Backup and Restore feature.

Recommendation: Windows Home Server functionality is compatible with client computers using Advanced Format disk for Windows Home Server v1 and the upcoming version codename “Vail”.

Note: Windows 7 client users please see KB982018 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982018/ ) for more information.

Advanced Format Disk Drive

It is important to note that some hard disk manufacturers are releasing Advanced Format drives in the same base models as traditional 512 byte sector drives. Because of this, it is critical that you make sure that the drive you are purchasing is not an Advanced Format drive if you are running Windows Home Server v1. Before you purchase a disk drive, review the product specifications or visit the manufacturers Web site to ensure that the drive is compatible with Windows Home Server. Be aware that Advanced Format drives are not always clearly identified on the retail packaging.