WD Quick Formatter, version 1.2.0.10

WD_Quick_Formatter_Win_1_2_0_10.zip
SHA1 8AC244039B5FDD8B1C7247486BCDA1C53F54FBEA

WD Quick Formatter.exe
SHA1 2F9D025CB2273FC153B1A30E06C1EBF5CD9C0DB

The tool works with Western Digital external disk drives.

Test with a 3 TB WD Elements disk.

In Windows 7, I get a choice between "XP Compatible" and "Most Compatible (Vista or later required)".

Selecting "XP Compatible" creates an MBR partition table with one NTFS partition. The disk is set to 4096 bytes per sector, meaning that the number of sectors on the disk is smaller than 2^32 and that an MBR partition table therefore can be made.

Selection "Most Compatible (Vista or later required)" creates a GUID partition table with the usual 128 MB reserved partition and an NTFS partition covering the rest of the disk. The disk is set to 512 bytes per sectors.

In Windows Server 2003, the tool does not give a choice. I did not examine it much, but it seems as a GUID partition table will be created, and that the disk sector size is kept as it is, 512 or 4096 bytes.

I did not test in other Windows versions.

I did not find a tool for just changing the sector size of an external WD disk without writing to the disk at the same time. In some situations such a tool could be useful.