2016-09-05 3:42 GMT+03:00 Hans <li...@c5ace.com>: > On 01/09/16 16:04, gevisz wrote: >> >> I have bought an external 5TB Western Digital hard drive >> that I am going to use mainly for backing up some files >> in my home directory and carrying a very big files, for >> example a virtual machine image file, from one computer >> to another. This hard drive is preformatted with NTFS. >> Now, I am going to format it with ext4 which probably >> will take a lot of time taking into account that it is >> going to be done via USB connection. So, before formatting >> this hard drive I would like to know if it is still >> advisable to partition big hard drives into smaller >> logical ones. >> >> For about 20 last years, following an advice of my older >> colleague, I always partitioned all my hard drives into >> the smaller logical ones and do very well know all >> disadvantages of doing so. :) >> >> But what are disadvantages of not partitioning a big >> hard drive into smaller logical ones? >> >> Is it still advisable to partition a big hard drive >> into smaller logical ones and why? >> >> > I use 2TB USB drive with one EXT4 partition. > Took about 30 seconds to format connected to a USB2 port.
May be. But I have just finished testing its first 41 GB with # badblocks -sw -b4096 Three passes with different write patterns took about 2 hours 10 minutes, that is about 33 minutes per pass. So, the full one-pass write test with badblocks should take about 3 days, if I do not err in my calculations. The same amount of time should take formatting it with # mke2fs -cc But I have not tried that so far. > Testing the drive with dd and copying files to the > drive is very slow. Don't touch "Green Drives". > They die like flies. What do you mean by this? My WDC WD15EADS (it is Green) already works (hosting my /home) for more than 10 years and the systems reports that it is still ok. (I work at this computer from 6 to 8 hours daily.)