Re: If your using large Sata drives in raid 5/6 ....

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se> writes:

> On Tue, 2 Feb 2010, Greg Freemyer wrote:
>
>> (I think these drives may already be available at least as
>> engineering samples.  Basic linux kernel support went in summer 2009
>> I believe. I believe 2.6.33 will be the first kernel to have been
>> tested with these new class of drives.)
>
> I purchased two WD20EARS drives yesterday, going to play around with
> them tonight. They emulate 512 bytes sectors to the SATA layer but
> write them as 4k on drive, so you want to make sure that everything
> that writes to the drive, writes in 4k block size (which is the case
> with most in linux as far as I have understood).
>
> So basically they'll work with any OS, but for best performance you
> need to make sure that things are aligned to 4k boundary and you want
> to write 4k at a time.

Make sure that your partitions are aligned then. Older partitioners will
start the first partition on block 63, meaning 32.5KiB into the disk.

MfG
        Goswin