I ended up doing some serious research online for a couple of days and came to the conclusion that if a WESTERN DIGITAL CAVIAR GREEN 2TB WD20EARS drive is to be used in a USB enclosure in XP [full data backup use with ONE partition only] you have to do the following steps:
1. Place the drive in a USB enclosure without a jumper.
2. Connect the enclosure to a Win XP pc via usb.
3. Run XP's disk management to partition the drive and format it using up the entire space, as well as leaving the default settings in the partition/format wizard. Such as NTFS, and default allocation size which I believe is 512. Use "quick format" in the wizards options otherwise be prepared to wait as much as 24+ hours on this 2TB drive for a normal format via usb. Some will say it's better to wait out a normal format for it to search for bad sectors and other information. But this can also be done later on with other tools in your spare time.
4. Download Paragon's WD Align software from
here. You can try Acronis' WD Align software but it didn't recognize my hdd as being an ADVANCED FORMAT DRIVE. It did however notice that it was improperly aligned. Paragon's WD Align was able to see that it was improperly aligned & fix it. This process should take about two minutes. If you tried both Acronis & Paragon's WD Align like I did you can now open up Acronis WD Align and see that the drive is now properly aligned. Even though Acronis may say it's not an ADVANCED FORMAT DRIVE which is odd. Double checking the alignment in Paragon's WD Align is a good idea just to be safe.
5. Drive is now ready for backup uses...
I found the drive to be very fast via usb and was lucky that it wasn't DOA as I've heard many say when they ordered this drive. Sure it may be new technology, and these drives aren't perfect yet. But for people like me with no more room to spare... I needed it! Don't trust your data to this drive for about a month or so of extensive use, and checking the hdd with health tools. I've heard some people have had this drive fail fairly quickly in less than a month. Those who haven't experienced that have still been running the drive without issues.
QUESTION 1:
Now does anyone know how to use WDIDLE3 on a WD20EARS drive? I know Neil said it's not for this drive before but I've seen countless posts online about people using it on this drive so...
QUESTION 2:
Ok well I have attached pictures of my setup with my VANTEC NEXSTAR NST-400MX-S2 SATA to USB HDD enclosure. I have one 2TB WD Caviar Green HDD connected to the "CON1" slot, and as you can see the "JBOD" sticker is pointing the opposite way from the "JBOD" print on the circuit board which is what is confusing me. I have it set to "BIG"... I don't know if this is the correct way to setup the enclosure for INDIVIDUAL drive use NOT JBOD, RAID, OR ANYTHING ELSE. Please look at the pictures and confirm with me if this is the correct way to setup INDIVIDUAL drives in this enclosure, or if I have the switch set wrong. I want to put another 2TB HDD in "CON2" slot one day in the future and have it as an INDIVIDUAL HDD too. Please help because I don't know what "BIG" stands for... I have done some small research and believe BIG is the same as JBOD. So if that's true why in the world would the switch be used for the same thing?
Thanks
Edited by superstar, 26 August 2010 - 06:43 PM.