John R Pierce wrote:
On 03/26/12 1:49 PM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
So, here's the answer: we have these Caviar Green 2tb drives (the thread I found had either a 1tb, or 1.5tb), (and no, we are*NOT* going to buy Caviar Green for servers ever again). The big thing is that they use 4k sectors,*not* 512 bytes. Following directions, I pulled it into fdisk, and then used a command I've not needed before: u. This changes units from cylinders (the default) to sectors. Having done that, p shows that it actually starts in sector 63. Again, following directions, I changed it to start in sector 64. Finished the partition, wrote it, made the filesystem, and tried it out.
almost all newer large capacity drives are using 4k sectors internally now. SSD physical block sizes are something like 128k bytes, so the problem is even worse.
I'd suggest getting in the habit of using parted rather than fdisk, as fdisk can't handle GPT formatted disks, and MBR can't handle anything over 2TB
Yeah... but parted is user hostile. A co-worker and I, both of whom don't need GUIs, use gparted. However, that doesn't tell me where it's aligning things.
This info - oh, meant to give the link to the author of the informative thread: http://linuxconfig.org/linux-wd-ears-advanced-format - does tell you what and why. Next time I need to build a 3TB drive (which will be soon), I'll play with parted, and see if it complains if I align it this way.
mark mark