Upgrading to Darwin

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Upgrading to Darwin

Postby stug101 » Mon Mar 07, 2011 6:33 pm

Hi, this may seem like a daft question, but I'll ask it anyway. I've just (10 days ago) upgraded the original disk in my Amstrad DRX780 to the 1TB WD Caviar Green WD10EARS disk that there are so many complaints about. I'm not running Darwin yet.

Copy was completed using Copy+ 1.2.0.8 on Windows Vista simply copying the entire disk over.

Will this copied disk be ok (theoretically) to upgrade to Darwin? I can't think of any reason why not, assuming it doesn't start showing the performance issues other people have mentioned.

Thanks,

Stu G
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Re: Upgrading to Darwin

Postby pcbbc » Mon Mar 07, 2011 6:52 pm

There are no problems (to the best of my knowledge) Darwin wise with disks of 1TB or less with any version of Copy+. The problems occur with disk disks over 1TB that were prepared with earlier versions of Copy+ to the current 1.2.0.8 release.
When used with a disk OVER 1TB, the current version of Copy+ is ONLY compatible with a Darwin upgraded box, unless the drive used is the 1.5TB unit from a DRX895. This is the only disk over 1TB that can be formatted to be bother forward and backward compatible with pre and post Darwin software releases (because it is the only disk over 1TB that Sky expected both versions of their software to encounter, so they made a special exception for it).

So you are correct - I can not see any reason why you would not be okay with Darwin.

However the advanced format (4K native sector size) of the EARS range is almost certainly going to cause you problems. FAT32 and XTVFS are not at all well optimised for 4K sectors.
There is nothing that can be done to work around this. The alignment tool and/or jumper provided by some drive manufacturers is IMHO knowing what I do about XTVFS not going to help either.
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Re: Upgrading to Darwin

Postby stug101 » Mon Mar 07, 2011 7:02 pm

Thanks for the quick response - is it normally the case that the upgrade to an EARS disk works ok initially then starts to suffer performance degradation? Mine is working fine at the moment. Assuming it does start to degrade, would I then be able to copy recordings from it to another disk from a different manufacturer/range - i.e. is it merely playback which is affected by the sector size and the recordings themselves should be corruption free?

Thanks,

Stu G
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Re: Upgrading to Darwin

Postby pcbbc » Tue Mar 08, 2011 10:28 am

stug101 wrote:Thanks for the quick response - is it normally the case that the upgrade to an EARS disk works ok initially then starts to suffer performance degradation? Mine is working fine at the moment. Assuming it does start to degrade, would I then be able to copy recordings from it to another disk from a different manufacturer/range - i.e. is it merely playback which is affected by the sector size and the recordings themselves should be corruption free?
I haven't investigated this in any great detail, but I understand the fundamental problems the 4K sectors impose at the file system level.
As time goes on the recording space will get fragmented. A few clusters here, a few there. This would impose an increasing overhead of reading and writing adjoining sectors.

No idea if this would effect the underlying recordings. There is going to be substantially more performance hit with AF drives on writing than reading, so if data is being lost it would most likely happen at time of recording and as a result is likely to be unrecoverable.
Additionally you have Darwin to consider which may rule out a copy to another drive for the time being.
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