On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 4:16 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > b > the Winchester Digital WD10EARS S-ATA II 300MB/s GreenPower WD Caviar Green > 1TByte Harddiscs offers something which WD calls "Advanced Format" > which turns out to be sectors of 4096 bytes size instead of 512 bytes. > > To use it, one needs a tool made by WD which only runs under windows. > > Or? > > Is this "new sector size" is something, which I can activate > be using fdisk/mkfs or something included in the linux kernel > since stone age and is only new to the guys at Microsoft/Winchester > Digital? > > Can I take any advantage of that? > > Thank you very much for any help and advice in advance! > Have a nice sunday! > mcc
Sort of none of the above. 4K sectors are 4K sectors. It isn't something you activate. It's the way the drive is made. However the drive responds to 512 byte sector addresses. You can use it as you would any other drive, however... 1) If you put your partitions on 4K boundaries the drive will be fast 2) If you put your sectors on 512 byte boundaries the drive will work but be very slow Either way it will work. I think #1 is better, but that's up to you. Simple answer about what to do? Make sure the starting address of all partitions is divisible by 8, or for simplicity have every partition starting address end with 3 zeros which is what some of the newer Windows setup tools are doing. I know the 3 zero thing sounds like you're wasting space, and you would be, but it's very small compared to the size of the drive so it's what I did. Now, if you have NOT already purchased the drive, my suggestion is that you do not, or if you insist on buying some get in touch with me. I have 6 sitting right here at home that I'll happily sell to you at reduced prices. ;-) These drives are saving power by parking the heads very quickly and my experience over the last few months is that they are likely going to wear out in about 18 months according to WD's spec of 300K park cycles. (Check SMART data yourself) Additionally they are completely unusable for any sort of RAID environment as WD removed all the TLER functions from the firmware. Linux is racking up 1 cycles every 2 minutes. (41476/1588) As best I can tell the drive will be out of spec in about 14 months if your machine is powered on 24/7. gandalf ~ # smartctl -i /dev/sda smartctl 5.39.1 2010-01-28 r3054 [x86_64-pc-linux-gnu] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Device Model: WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1 Serial Number: WD-WCAV55464493 Firmware Version: 80.00A80 User Capacity: 1,000,204,886,016 bytes Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall] ATA Version is: 8 ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated Local Time is: Sun Apr 18 08:36:44 2010 PDT SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled gandalf ~ # gandalf ~ # !smart smartctl -A /dev/sda smartctl 5.39.1 2010-01-28 r3054 [x86_64-pc-linux-gnu] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 129 128 021 Pre-fail Always - 6525 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 21 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 098 098 000 Old_age Always - 1588 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 20 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 5 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 187 187 000 Old_age Always - 41476 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 121 116 000 Old_age Always - 26 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0 gandalf ~ # - Mark
