John R Pierce wrote: > On 03/26/12 1:49 PM, m.roth at 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