[CentOS] 3TB system drive partitioning question

[m.roth at 5-cent.us]

Lamar Owen wrote:
>
> On Apr 18, 2012, at 12:16 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
>> ah, I can't see anywhere in the BIOS for this SuperMicro X8DT6 mobo
>> where to enable EFI, I guess its not supported.
<snip>
Argh! I missed the beginning of this thread, but this is important for you
to know, *specifically* with SuperMicro m/b's:
   0 and 1: make sure this 3TB drive is certified for this board. We have
a few Caviar Greens
     that either immediately, or within a few weeks or a month or two
suddenly start spitting
     drive errors - hardware drive errors - but when I take them out and
put them in *anything*
     else, even a cheap external eSATA drive bay, they're fine. After a
*lot* of research, I
     believe it's from how long it waits on error handling, but there's
nothing I've found
     that can change that enablement - WD took that capability away a
couple-three years ago.
   2: be *SURE* to align it on a 4K boundary, *not* a 512 one. If you
change units in parted,
     it will default want to start in sector 63; change that to 64.
Alternatively, if you
     tell it to start with aligned=opt, it will do it on 2048 (why not
1024, I don't know). This
     makes a *major* difference in speed... as in quadrupled.
   3. See points 0 and 1.

Oh, yes, and the two 3TB drives, a Hitachi and a Seagate Constellation,
certified for our servers which use the H8QG6 m/b, the *only* two, are not
available. They're backordered *everywhere*, including CDW, and Penguin,
our vendor for those servers, just admitted to me Monday that I was right,
*they* had them on backorder.

         mark