[Bug 780093] Re: No way to align 4096/4k-HDDs properly

[Grizzly]

Yes, cuurent gparted does things right.

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Title:
  No way to align 4096/4k-HDDs properly

Status in “gparted” package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: gparted

  I just got myself a WD-2TB-Green 2TB hard disk drive without checking the forums first, implicating that problems from the
  renaissance of computing, e.i. the last decade should not matter any more. I was naive again.

  EARS-Type drives have two annoying "features": for their capacity,
  they are transitional 512-Byte-Sector internally and 4096 Byte sectors
  externally.

  Palimpsest informs me, that the partition is misaligned by 512 bytes -
  which is natural, as the default partition start in linux is 0x63 -
  512 Bytes short. It does not offer further help how to fix this -
  neither does gparted.

  Performance is ugly, like 40 MB/s instead of >=100 MB/s.

  I also learn from the forums again that like some notebook drives back
  in 2007/2008 the EARS is parking every 8 seconds and woken up every
  20s by the kernel when used as system drive. So either fuddling around
  with some obscure WDD-DOS tool or hoping that smartmontool's smartclt
  -s 242 /dev/sdX will save the day.

  Luckily, you only buy large terabyte green-style drives for
  archiving/data server. Raiding those makes it even worse, as there is
  only a message of mkfs.xfs that 4096k-Sectors are not supported by
  XFS. Good that my system is on the nice 40gb cheap and fast intel
  v-series ssd. No parking probs noted here.

  As a result, my 2-disk stripe does 50 MB/sec where it should to in
  between 200-100 MB/sec for large files.

  It is so obvious when copying from a standard-raid0 with 2 samsung blues:
  0 MB for 2 secs, then 300 MB for a sec then nothing again like
  |  |  |  | in gkrellm. Sad.

  And someone clever posted, that for zfs (or zfs-fuse) there is no way even to tell right now how things are there.
  -> ZFS-fuse should be ok though when getting xfs-based large files as containers for devs.

  Please (upstream involved)
  - fix gparted, parted, fdisk, palimpsest to recognize 4k-sector drives and adjust partition boundaries accordingly upon creation - at least add an option to do so
  - fix xfs / mdadm to handle 4k striped arrays
  - Include a "disable head parking" somewhere graphically for newbies.

  I havent looked into btrfs, though.

  To keep blood pressure low ;-) haha - I am not going into the TLER problem, in my case I would rather want my drive to report failed too soon then the other way round - meaning it would be nice, to enable tler. What have they thought at wdd? Greens are not for running a system from - just for backup and mid-performance raids. And they take away the most importand things... sad.
  Next time it will be Korea again :-)

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