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

[Joseph Fry]

> > I seem to recall some past threads on the list talking about issues with
> drives whose capacity is something greater than 1TB, but I don't remember
> what the threshold was nor what the issue(s) might be..
>
> The threshold is 2TB. Once you hit that then you need to use a "newer"
> partitioning scheme (ie GUID rather than MBR) and a partitioning tool that
> supports it. Also, if booting from it, you probably also need to create a
> small partition just for GRUB to install itself in as there isn't a "safe"
> gap between boot sectors/partition table and the start fo the first
> partition as there is with MBR.
> > FWIW, my mobo is an ASUS A8N-SLI which supports SATA-I/II
> > I'm also concerned with the possibility that I might have issues with
> SATA-III (6Gb/s) drives working on this system.
> > Are they backward compatible with SATA-II?
>
> 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.
> --
>

With a drive over 2TB in size you will want to use GPT rather than MBR for
sure... I don't believe there is a tool to partition a GPT based disk that
won't automatically align everything properly to the 4k sectors; gdisk
works well.
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