On 07/27/2011 12:30 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:
For reasons that are irrelevant to this discussion, we have ended up
with a number of new workstations with WD Advanced Format "green" 1.5
TByte drives. We have been experiencing a number of difficulties that
had to do with partition boundaries, etc. After a bit of digging, I found:
http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/Problem-with-WD-Advanced-Format-drive-in-LINUX-WD15EARS/td-p/6395
Is anyone using a WD Advanced Format drive with SL 6? We are not and
probably will/can not use LVM, but rather standard ext 2, 3, or 4
partitions, included the extended partition model.
If you are using this type of drive, information on the specifics of the
formatting command(s) and syntax to use these WD drives would be
appreciated. Any link to a detailed document or URL would be appreciated.
Yasha Karant
Yes, I have a bunch of GP drives in various Fedora 13/14, CentOS 5 and
SL6 systems. Although the formatting was not done on SL6, SL6 did
install on the existing partitions and seems to be working fine. By
"fine" I mean >70 MB/s read/write speeds.
The trick seems to be having "MultiSect=16" in the hdparm output like
below. People who's hdparm reported MultiSect=1 seemed to have issues.
The other thing to keep an eye on with the GP drives is the load cycle
count in SMART. I run the wdidle.exe utility in freedos to disable head
parking altogether. Without that you can easily get beyond the rated
load cycle rating of the drive in a matter of months.
Jeff
----------
hdparm -i /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
Model=WDC, FwRev=01.00A01, SerialNo=WD-Blah
Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec SpinMotCtl Fixed DTR>5Mbs FmtGapReq }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=50
BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=unknown, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=3907029168
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5 *udma6
AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled
Drive conforms to: Unspecified: ATA/ATAPI-1,2,3,4,5,6,7
* signifies the current active mode
