Installing a WD Advanced Format Drive

[racefan20]

I'm installing a 2TB WD green drive. Is there anything special I have to do before I partition it? I'm running Mint Debian w/ UDP 4.

[srs5694]

Probably not, but that depends on how recent your partitioning software is. See this article I wrote on the subject a while back. Versions of parted, fdisk, and gdisk released in the last year or so generally do the right thing automatically; however, given the severity of the problem if partitions aren't properly aligned, particularly with some filesystems, it's worth double-checking the alignment before writing large amounts of data to the disk.

[racefan20]

Thanks. I will be using the GParted version (0.11.0) that is installed with Mint Debian. The hard drive is the newest green model WD20EARX. I'll be sure to check the alignment before I start using it. I just have to get the SATA controllers sorted out first because it drops SATA6, when I plug something into SATA3 which is currently not being used.

[racefan20]

Just had to swap some cables around to get things recognized.

Ok, I created two primary partitions and aligned to Mib using GParted. From what I've read, they seemed to be aligned properly. Here's the details... everything look ok?

[srs5694]

Yes, both partitions' start points are divisible by 8, so they're fine.