[mythtv-users] WD15EARS WD Green drives

David Whyte david.whyte at gmail.com
Mon May 9 02:29:33 UTC 2011


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. :(

Cheers,
Whytey


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