For the time being, the EARS series of drives actually present 512 byte sectors to the o/s through emulation in firmware.
The drive I tested was WD20EARS (2TB WD Caviar Green Advanced Format drives): MDL: WD20EARS-00S81 DATE: 29 DEC 2009 DCM: HBRNHT2BB DCX: 6019S1W87 LBA: 3907029168 The LBA above is key -. this s the unmber of sectors presented by the drive's firmware to the host o/s. Combinations of jumpers, and runnign the WD alignment utility only appears to reorganise how the ECC is stored in 4k blocks physically on disk, but the drive still presents each 4K physicaly dick block as 8 x 512byte logical blocks to the host. I have logged a support request with WD to see if they may be releasing firmware that will present the 4k blocks natively. As an individual user, i actually doubt that WD will ever respond. I can only hope that quite a few others (00's / 000's) of other people also log similar requests and that WD may release appropriate firmware. Would be grateful to hear of any others and their testing experiences with other series of advanced format drives from WD. The drives works perfectly on 64bit kernel, but not on 32bit osol kernels. I purchased the drive just to test on 32bit kernel - mainly as there are quite a lot of soho NAS devices that may be able to use our Velitium Embedded Kit for OpenSolaris with drives larger than 1TB. It would be nice if the 32bit osol kernel support 48bit LBA (similar to linux, not sure if 32bit BSD supports 48bit LBA ), then the drive would probably work - perhaps later in the year we will have time to work on a patch to support 48bit lba on the 32bit osol kernels... Darren Mackay http://www.sikkra.com http://sourceforge.net/projects/velitium/ -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
