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
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