[mythtv-users] WD15EARS WD Green drives

[Nick Rout]

On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 2:29 PM, David Whyte <david.whyte at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 2:10 PM, Kevin Ross <kevin at familyross.net> wrote:
>> On 3/13/2011 8:29 PM, Digital Hit Entertainment wrote:
>>> Found a great sale on the WD15EARS Green 1.5 TB drive. I saw some earlier stuff on the list about the drive and wanted to know if the latest MythTV versions have any problems with them.
>>>
>>> Any tips or things to watch out for?
>>>
>>> Thanks.
>>
>> Those drives have 4K sectors, so just make sure you start your
>> partitions on an even multiple of 8 sectors (the drive lies to the OS
>> and reports that it has 512-byte sectors.  4096/512 is 8), and you're
>> good to go.  If you don't, performance will suck.
>
>
> Doh!
>
> So I bought one of these about 12 months ago and use it as my primary
> recording drive in my BE (which at the time was on mythbuntu 9.10).
> Just lately, I have noticed some terrible issues which I believe to be
> performance related.  Last night, I was playing back (on a remote FE)
> a HD recording that was still in progress and another SD recording was
> also being recorded and got kicked out of playback and noted that my
> commercial flagging jobs seemed to have terminate prematurely.  I was
> also experiencing choppiness as recordings were being expired by the
> BE, something that has started to happen in the last couple of months.
>  WD forums seem to indicate that drive performance degrades as the
> disk get greater than 75% full, which I guess has happened in the last
> couple of months.  When I checked the output of hdparms for the disk,
> my single XFS partition starts at sector 63!  Doh!
>
> I understand that newer versions of mythbuntu (greater than or equal
> to 10.04, which I am currently running) handle the larger sectors
> sizes much more gracefully.
>
> Quick question, can anything be done?  Now it is full of recordings, I
> don't want to go and re-partition it and erase all of my data.  I am
> guessing I need to go and buy a second disk and copy all my data to
> that and then repartition the original. :(

yes, but enjoy the extra space, you can never have too much of it!