Message: 10
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 22:26:05 +0900
From: Rob [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: 160 Gb Harddisk: needs extra tweeking?
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Hi,
I never had such a monster of a big harddisk; hence my question.
I've got a 160 Gb Western Digital Harddisk (WD 1600 JB).
It comes with a tiny CD-rom, about 8cm in diameter, entitled
Data Lifeguard Tools. I don't know what to do with this CDrom.
You should probably ignore the disk. I do.
I am planning to use this harddisk as the only harddisk in
my PC and install FreeBSD (preferably version 5-Current) on it.
Will I encounter problems? Does it need extra tweeking?
I use two in my old Cyrix 133 MHz mailserver and they work fine. I
don't recall doing any tweaking, except perhaps adjusting the number of
inodes when I formatted it. More about that below.
The Western Digital homepage says somewhere: Hard drives larger than
137 GB require a controller card to utilize full drive capacity.
What does that mean?
Good question. I didn't need to find out, because one of my drives came
with an Ultra-ATA controller card. Usually if your BIOS can figure out
how to boot from it and get the FreeBSD kernel loaded, you will be ok.
Another question. The Western Digital homepage lists this about the harddisk:
Data Transfer Rate (Buffer to Host)
100 MB/s (Mode 5 Ultra ATA)
66.6 MB/s (Mode 4 Ultra ATA)
33.3 MB/s (Mode 2 Ultra ATA)
16.6 MB/s (Mode 4 PIO)
16.6 MB/s (Mode 2 multi-word DMA)
Do I have to tell this to the kernel somehow, or is this a BIOS thing?
Are there good reasons not to choose the fastest option Mode 5 here?
The kernel ATA driver will figure it out. It will use the highest data
rate your controller and hard drive can both manage, IF you use the
correct cable. If you use a standard ATA cable, then your speed will be
limited (to 33.3 MB/s, I think). Be sure you use a high speed cable if
you have a high speed controller. The default is probably to use PIO,
so if you want the possibly faster DMA mode, you will need to figure out
how to do that. man ad will probably provide more useful information.
When you get to the point where you are formatting the device, think
about what you are going to be storing on it. If it will be a bunch of
very large files, you can format it with fewer inodes, which will make
more capacity available for data and less for overhead. On the other
hand, if you are going to be storing a bunch of small files, you will
need more inodes. You use at least one inode per file, and when you run
out of inodes, you can't have any more files, even if there is still
space on the disk. The default installation assumes something like an
average of 8K bytes/file, so if your files will be much smaller than
that, you should adjust the format accordingly.
If you are manually adjusting things, you would use something like
newfs -i 32768 [remaining args]
to reformat your drive assuming 32K bytes per file. I think you can
also do this when you are configuring the BSD partitions in sysinstall.
Thanks for help and advice.
Rob.
Hope it helps.
- Bob
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