Click on the Erase tab in the Disk Utility toolbar. After Disk Utility loads select the WD drive (out-dented entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the side list. Open Disk Utility in the Utilities' folder. Drive Partition and Format - El Capitan or Later.
![]() ![]() Mechanical hard drives have traditionally organized data in 512-byte sectors. With a top speed that’s still well within the capabilities of the 3Gbps Serial ATA spec, the drive has no need for a next-gen 6Gbps SATA link.The Scorpio Black does adopt one new standard: Advanced Format. The 750GB drive has a maximum sustained data rate of 180MB/s, which is quite a bit faster than the 154MB/s quoted for the 500GB model. Perhaps that’s why hard drive makers have largely stopped publishing random access time specifications for new models.Western Digital is eager to boast about the Scorpio’s improved sequential throughput, though. At the same time, packing smaller bits more tightly makes each one harder to target when the drive head is darting across the platter accessing data that isn’t laid out neatly on a single track. The higher the bit density of the platters, the more data passes under the drive head with each revolution, increasing sequential throughput. Reformat A Western Digital Hard Drive Mac OS Are AlreadyWindows 7, Vista, and recent versions of the Mac OS are already primed for Advanced Format.All the fresh goodness baked into the 750GB iteration of the Scorpio Black really comes down to the platters—how much data they can store and with what sort of sector formatting. Fortunately, WD supplies a free utility that will align partitions for optimal performance with the old OS. The ECC block is actually a little larger with Advanced Format, but because it pops up less frequently, Western Digital says 4KB sectors can boost a drive’s useful storage capacity by 7-11%.Advanced Format can create problems for Windows XP, which was designed with 512-byte sectors in mind. These blocks consume precious storage capacity and are still present with Advanced Format—they just appear every 4KB rather than every 512 bytes. For this data-rich reality, the storage industry has settled on a new Advanced Format scheme that segments drives into 4KB sectors.By far the biggest problem with 512-byte sectors is that each one is sandwiched between blocks that contain data associated with data addressing and error correction. However, 512-byte sectoring wasn’t really designed for a world in which terabyte hard drives are commonplace. We won’t be offended.The Scorpio Black’s most direct competition comes from other 7,200-RPM notebook drives. We include these details to help you better understand and replicate our results, but if you’re already familiar with our approach to storage testing, feel free to skip ahead to the benchmarks. The rest are saddled with just three years of coverage.Before burying you under a deluge of benchmark graphs, let’s take a quick look at the mix of rivals we’ve put together to face the Scorpio Black 750GB, and the methods we use to test storage devices here at TR. Seagate’s Momentus XT mechanical/SSD hybrid is the only other notebook model we’ve seen with a five-year warranty. The fact that WD’s competitors have yet to push beyond 16MB with their mobile products means no one has to keep up with the Joneses, I suppose.Speaking of keeping up—or, rather, not—hard drive makers have been reluctant to match the five years of warranty coverage that Western Digital applies to its premium Black line. The company has long downplayed the benefits of larger caches, but that hasn’t stopped it from slapping 64MB into its high-performance Caviar Blacks and low-power Caviar Greens. Free download title song of punar vivah serial mp3Below is a chart outlining several key characteristics that can affect the performance of the contenders we’ve lined up.Although it might not seem like a fair fight, we’ve thrown in results for a striped RAID 0 array built using a pair of Intel’s X25-V SSDs. For comparative reference, we’ve also included results from a collection of 3.5″ mechanical drives. Seagate’s Momentus XT mechanical/SSD hybrid is included in the mix, as is a stack of solid-state drives that share the same 2.5″ form factor as the Scorpio. Before testing SSDs, each is returned to a factory-fresh state with a secure erase, which empties all the flash pages on the drive. Rapid Storage Technology drivers.The block-rewrite penalty inherent to SSDs and the TRIM command designed to offset it both complicate our testing somewhat, so I should explain our methods in greater detail. Our X25-V array was configured using Intel’s P55 storage controller, the default 128KB stripe size, and the company’s latest 9.
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