Hello all,

My current setup runs on top of 2x Western Digital 2500KS drives on Raid-1, using the motherboard's 780G raid controller, on WinXP. Everything is fine, but the drives are a bit noisy.

I am considering buying 2x WD6400AARS disks which are the 640GB slower 'green' drives, but also feature the Advanced Formatting 4KB sectors. This means that for WinXP the partition will have to be aligned to work properly, else there is a performance penalty.

There are 2 questions here: The Green drives from WD are all slower and are (according to WD) susceptible to drop-out's from the controller. Has anyone any experience in this matter? Is there a possibility the controller will drop a drive? If so, can i do anything about it?

Secondly, western digital gives a utility to perform the alignment on the partition. The thing is, will the utility see the drives in question as the operating system only sees 1 logical disk?

I will be making the transition using a cloning tool (most probably norton ghost) unless i don't find a solution or a clear answer, in which case i'll just buy a win 7 license and make a clean install...

thx in advance