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Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2010 09:11:24 +0300
From: Valentin Nechayev <netch@netch.kiev.ua>
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Subject: Re: Support for WD Advanced Format disks
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> After poking around some, it seems ATA/ATAPI-7 Identify
> Device word 106

According to my tests WD EARS (at least 1.5) stably keep silence about this. 
I've seen 2 different disks from different parties.
Moreover, one disk was unable to read last sector with jumper 7-8 because
it didn't decrease reported size. This maybe firmware error.

So one shall not rely on this identification at least for WD.

Comments for the question (mainly in Russian) and links
http://netch80.livejournal.com/12985.html

Linux is stably moving to having partition align at 4KB or higher boundary
to avoid such problems at all.
https://bugzilla.altlinux.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16000


-netch-