On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 1:53 PM, Robert Arkiletian robark@gmail.com wrote:
Still have good quality older sata hardware raid cards that require 512 bytes/sector. As far as I know HD manufacturers are not making native 512 bytes/sector drives any more.
512n drives still exist, although they tend to be a bit smaller, 2TB or less. http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/FD3F376DC2ECCE68882579D40082C3...
4Kn drives are appearing now also. I don't expect these drives to be bootable except possibly by systems with UEFI firmware. It's also possible hardware RAID will reject them unless explicitly supported. http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/29C9312E3B7D10CE88257D41000D8D...
Some have better 512e emulation than others. Looking for some advice on which to avoid and which are recommended. Thanks. PS this is for a CentOS6 server.
The emulation implementations don't come into play if the alignment is correct from the start. The better implementations have significantly less pathological behavior if alignment is wrong, but that's anecdotal, I don't have any empirical data available. But I'd say in any case you want it properly aligned.