On 12/23/10 1:19 AM, Chris Baker wrote:
>
> Thank you for your response. I'm not sure what sector size my hard drives
> use. I do know that they are Western Digital Caviar Green drives with a 64
> MB buffer. They are 7200 rpm.
>
> I know that partitions over 2048 GB have to be set up differently. If
> there is something else I need to do, I will do it. Partition is ext3.
>
> I'm thinking a lot about the need to upgrade this system. I haven't done
> much of anything with it since we got it back in 2008. BackupPC was such a
> bear to set up that I wasn't sure that I wanted to take that plunge again.
> My attitude has been don't upgrade unless you must.
>
> I remember doing a kernel upgrade and losing access to a drive. I didn't
> try it again.

I'm pretty sure those do have 4k sectors.  Here's something that popped up from 
google:
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/storage/36189-wd-caviar-green-ears-2tb-linux.html

The problem is that if you write less than 4k or if the start of the write 
isn't 
aligned at a 4k boundry, the drive has to read the sector, merge what you 
wrote, 
wait for the drive to spin around, and write it back. They are not supposed to 
be too bad if you can make the partition start at the right place.  I ran into 
the problem trying to add a 750 gig laptop drive into an existing raid1 set for 
something to take offsite easily and gave up on getting it to sync in a day's 
time.  I'll probably start over with that system when CentOS 6 is released.

-- 

   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com


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