On Thu, 09 Jun 2011 09:33:23 -0400, Doug Lytle <[email protected]> wrote:
I've purchased a Hitachi 3TB drive that uses 4k sectors.
The drive is using 4k physical sectors. Is it using 512 byte logical sectors or 4k logical sectors? If it's using 4k logical sectors, you don't have to worry about alignment. If it's using 512 byte logical sectors, then you have two things to do. Ensure partitions are aligned on 4k boundaries. Use a gpt partition table, instead of a msdos style partition table, as the msdos partition table cannot address anything beyond 2TB, due to the use of 32 bit sector numbers. I'd use gparted to partition the drive. In gparted, select Device, Create partition table, Advanced, and use the drop down button to select a partition table type of gpt. This creates a msdos style mbr with a fake 2TB partition, so that older partitioning tools like fdisk won't see any free space, and uses the guid partition table to store information about the real partitions. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table for details. I think gparted will default to aligning the partitions on 1MB boundaries, which is a multiple of 4k. After you've partitioned the drive with gparted, you may be able to use diskdrake to specify the mount points, and create the fstab entries, but I'm not sure if it will work with a gpt partition table, as I've never tried it. Regards, Dave Hodgins
