I received a 3TB Seagate drive today. Due to PC-clone boot issues, they don't sell it as an ordinary SATA drive, but you can buy the external USB drive and merely take it out of the box. It's $200. See:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148580 I'm writing to suggest that parted developers consider getting such a drive and testing with it. It's the first ordinary SATA drive holding more than 2TB. Here's a review of the drive (both as a SATA drive and in its native USB2 and optional USB3 interfaces): http://www.anandtech.com/show/3858/the-worlds-first-3tb-hdd-seagate-goflex-desk-3tb-review/ See in particular the section "The 2TB Barrier" which describes some of the problems with MBR partitions, PC-clone boot roms, etc, that are keeping these nice larger drives off the SATA drive market. (I've heard that 4TB drives are ready to go, except for these issues.) The 3TB drive apparently fakes 4K sectors in order to divide the MBR sector numbers by 8, allowing >2TB to be addressed in 32 bits -- but it's really a 512-byte-sector drive. I was thinking you could manipulate the fake MBR at the front of a GPT drive to useful effect, e.g. allowing an old BIOS to boot a GPT drive. If you think so too, there's a great page here: http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/hybrid.html about "Hybrid MBRs" and all the problems you can find with them. (The page also says parted wipes out any hybrid MBRs it finds, at least in version 1.9.0; has that been fixed?) Here's what the Ubuntu 10.04 Linux kernel (2.6.32-24-generic-pae) says when I plug one of these in on USB: [2509826.884084] usb 1-10: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 14 [2509827.017270] usb 1-10: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice [2509827.019228] scsi20 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices [2509827.019596] usb-storage: device found at 14 [2509827.019603] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning [2509832.016322] usb-storage: device scan complete [2509832.017081] scsi 20:0:0:0: Direct-Access Seagate FA GoFlex Desk 0155 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4 [2509832.018254] sd 20:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0 [2509832.032135] sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] 732566645 4096-byte logical blocks: (3.00 TB/2.72 TiB) [2509832.032739] sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off [2509832.032746] sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] Mode Sense: 1c 00 00 00 [2509832.032751] sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through [2509832.033620] sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] 732566645 4096-byte logical blocks: (3.00 TB/2.72 TiB) [2509832.034238] sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through [2509832.034245] sdd: sdd1 [2509832.042507] sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] 732566645 4096-byte logical blocks: (3.00 TB/2.72 TiB) [2509832.043095] sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through [2509832.043104] sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI disk Here's what parted (2.2) says: $ sudo parted /dev/sdd Warning: Device /dev/sdd has a logical sector size of 4096. Not all parts of GNU Parted support this at the moment, and the working code is HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL. GNU Parted 2.2 Using /dev/sdd Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands. (parted) print Model: Seagate FA GoFlex Desk (scsi) Disk /dev/sdd: 3001GB Sector size (logical/physical): 4096B/4096B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 28.7kB 3001GB 3001GB primary (parted) quit % mount | grep sdd /dev/sdd1 on /media/FreeAgent GoFlex Drive type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096,default_permissions) % df | grep sdd /dev/sdd1 2930255996 390704 2929865292 1% /media/FreeAgent GoFlex Drive It apparently came partitioned as an NTFS drive. John _______________________________________________ parted-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/parted-devel
