Public bug reported:
Binary package hint: gparted
I just got myself a WD-2TB-Green 2TB hard disk drive without checking the
forums first, implicating that problems from the
renaissance of computing, e.i. the last decade should not matter any more. I
was naive again.
EARS-Type drives have two annoying "features": for their capacity, they
are transitional 512-Byte-Sector internally and 4096 Byte sectors
externally.
Palimpsest informs me, that the partition is misaligned by 512 bytes -
which is natural, as the default partition start in linux is 0x63 - 512
Bytes short. It does not offer further help how to fix this - neither
does gparted.
Performance is ugly, like 40 MB/s instead of >=100 MB/s.
I also learn from the forums again that like some notebook drives back
in 2007/2008 the EARS is parking every 8 seconds and woken up every 20s
by the kernel when used as system drive. So either fuddling around with
some obscure WDD-DOS tool or hoping that smartmontool's smartclt -s 242
/dev/sdX will save the day.
Luckily, you only buy large terabyte green-style drives for
archiving/data server. Raiding those makes it even worse, as there is
only a message of mkfs.xfs that 4096k-Sectors are not supported by XFS.
Good that my system is on the nice 40gb cheap and fast intel v-series
ssd. No parking probs noted here.
As a result, my 2-disk stripe does 50 MB/sec where it should to in
between 200-100 MB/sec for large files.
It is so obvious when copying from a standard-raid0 with 2 samsung blues:
0 MB for 2 secs, then 300 MB for a sec then nothing again like
| | | | in gkrellm. Sad.
And someone clever posted, that for zfs (or zfs-fuse) there is no way even to
tell right now how things are there.
-> ZFS-fuse should be ok though when getting xfs-based large files as
containers for devs.
Please (upstream involved)
- fix gparted, parted, fdisk, palimpsest to recognize 4k-sector drives and
adjust partition boundaries accordingly upon creation - at least add an option
to do so
- fix xfs / mdadm to handle 4k striped arrays
- Include a "disable head parking" somewhere graphically for newbies.
I havent looked into btrfs, though.
To keep blood pressure low ;-) haha - I am not going into the TLER problem, in
my case I would rather want my drive to report failed too soon then the other
way round - meaning it would be nice, to enable tler. What have they thought at
wdd? Greens are not for running a system from - just for backup and
mid-performance raids. And they take away the most importand things... sad.
Next time it will be Korea again :-)
** Affects: gparted (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/780093
Title:
No way to align 4096/4k-HDDs properly
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