[mythtv-users] Need advice re: expand/replacement storage

[faginbagin]

On 1/25/2013 2:44 PM, HP-mini wrote:
> On Fri, 2013-01-25 at 11:17 -0800, Jay Foster wrote:
>>> AFAIK, SATA is all interoperable - the end of each link negotiate for the highest speed they both support and run at that. If the drive does 6Gbps and your controller is limited to 3Gbps, then they will negotiate and run at 3.
>>>>>   I am considering adding a 2TB WD disk to my system (WD2002FAEX).
>>> Then the partitioning problems do not apply. As already mentioned, you should start your partitions at a multiple of 8 'sectors', while fdisk will default to starting at 63. Since I think all large drives now use 4k sectors on the disk, such a mislignment affects performance.
>>> -- Simon Hobson
>> For what it's worth, I recently replaced my WD 2TB drive with another WD
>> 2TB drive (WDC WD2003FYYS-02W0B1) and it has 512 byte sectors.  I used
>> fdisk to partition it (one partition).  The previous 2TB drives that
>> this replaced had failed (WD2001FASS-00U0B0 and WD2001FASS-00W2B0).
>>
>> Jay
>>
> AFAIK fdisk does not support GPT partitioning&  does not default to
> correct alignment.
> 
> The stock disk tools in *buntu 12.04 are not up to the job either.
> It is easy enough to build latest stable "gparted" from source on Ubuntu
> 12.04&  10.04.
> 
> The "idle3-tools" let you increase the idle-head-park on the WD HDD
> green drives.
> 
> My incorrectly aligned WD EARX 2TB green (ext4) ran about 30% slower.

I had no trouble using gparted on *buntu 12.04. It defaulted to creating partitions on 1 MiB boundaries, sectors all starting at multiples of 2048*512. You may be right about the partition editor used by the installer, but if you go into "Try *buntu" from the live CD,  "apt-get install gparted", it will properly partition 4K physical sector drives.

FWIW, I got a couple of 3tb drives for the holidays. One is a Toshiba Canvio 3TB external drive. I was surprised to find it came with an msdos partition table with one ntfs partition that used 4k logical sectors and was 3TB in size. The drive inside is an Hitachi HDS5C3030BLE630. The other drive is a WDC WD30EZRX with 512 bytes logical, 4K physical sector sizes, so I had to use GPT to partition it. This drive is a Sata III drive. I was pleasantly surprised to find it works with a PCI Sata I controller using a SiI 3512 in a 10 year old PC running debian lenny, despite some reports of problems on the web with the 3512 chipset.

Regards,
Helen