On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 8:20 AM, Hendrik Boom <hend...@topoi.pooq.com> wrote: > I have two new 3TB disks. I'm adding them to an existing Debian (stable/ > squeeze AMD64) system. ... > I have several questions: > > (1) Is there up-to-date documentation on these matters. I'd love to RTFM > if only I could find the FM. I gather I need to know about: > > (1a) sector size and how to choose it,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format Large modern disks use 4096 byte sectors, but most/all still report 512 (too many old OSs out there). Linux kernel higher than 2.6.31 properly reports size and alignment issues. Use 4k block size when creating the FS. Use parted/gparted/other libparted program, as it can handle GPT (which you also probably want) and automatically aligns for 4k. I got a 4k disk fairly early on, haven't had any problems, but it is just a backup disk. I used gparted to set it up, no problems. I don't have any one source for all this, just accumulation from different places. And it has been a while, so use a grain of salt. > (1b) disk block numbers more than 32 bits, > (1c) file and partition size limits among ext2, 3, and 4. (my6 ext3's > were migrated from ext2, so they may share the limits of the original > ext2fs) The man pages should cover that, or the Wikipedia pages. IMO, there are plenty of reasons to go with new Ext4 filesystems anyway. > (1d) EFI Only applies with a pretty new motherboard that supports it. > (1e) How this all affects booting (presumably with GRUB-2) in case I have > a non-EFI BIOS (it is a somewhat old machine, having been build when SATA > was just appearing on the market) Grub2 should be fine, it knows stuff like GPT > (1f) Which of the utilities I'm used to will handle this large a disk > with a new partitioning scheme and larger files -- things like fsck, > badblocks, lvm, software RAID, rdiff-backup, grub, lilo, sqlite, etc. Id > badblocks can't hacl it. for example. the full-service disk test I'm now > doing may be useless. I couldn't say much about it, but I would think fsck should only care about the FS, not the underlying disk.Sqlite and such should be high enough up the stack that it wouldn't be an issue. As far as I know the kernel and filesystems and fs utilities have pretty much been updated. > (1f) Whether all this would go better with wheezy instead of squeeze, and > so whether I should upgrade squeeze to wheezy first. Couldn't hurt, and wheezy is getting close to release... That said, the squeeze kernel should be fine, I would mostly just double check the version of parted. (I do not remember what versions of things I was using when I did it, I run unstable on my PC) > (1g) Would an up-to-date Debian installer take care of most of this > stuff? It's not the way I [refer to go, because this machine is normally > kept running 24 hours a day, and is actually used for much of this time. > Reconfiguring a newly-installed system, instead of an upgrade, would be a > pain. I do not think it is needed at all. Cheers, Kelly Clowers -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/CAFoWM=-noB=l3yk2prl+os8s0l06xgq8qtshtiej+5hugyb...@mail.gmail.com
