Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1184 mails)

[Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 5:15 PM, Swapnil Bhartiya
<swapnil.bhartiya@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > I'm betting at least one of those has 4KB physical sectors and you
> > have a misaligned partition on it that is used by openSUSE and Ubuntu,
> > but not by Windows.
> >
> > Misalignment is a configuration issue, not a malfunction.
> >
> > So step 1 use hdparm to determine the physical sector sizes:
> >
> > ie.
> > sudo /sbin/hdparm -I /dev/sda | head -25
> >
> > should show the Sector sizes near the end of the output.
> >
> > Once we know if any of your drives have 4KB sectors, we can proceed from
> > there.
>
>
> Here is the output:
>
> https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B-ALfi5glBeCOTc0ODlkM2MtMzRhMS00ZTc0LTkwNmEtOGY2YWI1OGEyYjQz

Per that, they all have 512byte logical and physical sectors.

But I googled your EARS drive and see lots of complaints about performance.

One message says:

=================
Recomendations:

If you have a new hdd wdc wd15ears and ability to copy data from old
hdd to new one, it's better to set jumpers to enable advanced format
and set up new system.

Using of utility wdalign takes a lot of time!

In my case with 1,5Tb hdd it takes more than 30 hours!
===================

Back to Greg talking:

advanced format is WD speak for 4KB sectors.

So my guess is that your EARS drive has 4KB sectors, but is lying
about that fact to linux.  It may be there is a jumper that will at
least get it to tell the truth to hdparm.  Solving that is your first
step.

The trouble is you already have a filesystem with valid data on there.
 Getting hdparm to see the real physical sector size just means the
NEXT time you partition the drive the partitions will be aligned with
the physical sectors, but until then you are screwed.

FYI: there should be a jumper that sets the 4KB sector alignment
between 1MB aligned and sector 63 aligned.  DON'T change that jumper
unless you are ready to re-partition and re-format.  It has the effect
of moving all of your data by a couple sectors.  Which means your
current filesystems will quit working.

If it were me, I'd get another new drive and replace the EARS one.  If
you want to get another EARS drive, then make sure you have the
jumpers set right before you do any partitioning.  Then move your
filesystems from the old, likely misaligned drive, to the new,
hopefully properly aligned, one.

HTH
Greg
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