On 07/27/2011 07:09 PM, Jeff Siddall wrote:
> 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
You state:
Although the formatting was not done on SL6, SL6 did
install on the existing partitions and seems to be working fine.
On what system using what utilities did you format the WD drives?
I have installed SL 6 on existing partitions on other drives with no
issue -- but the SL 6 install on these WD bare drives using the default
disk format/partitions/block size/... from the SL 6 installation GUI
(that appears to be very, very similar to the stock RHEL 6 installation
GUI) did not produce a correct partition structure.
[root@ahprc2 ykarant]# fdisk /dev/sda
WARNING: DOS-compatible mode is deprecated. It's strongly recommended to
switch off the mode (command 'c') and change display units to
sectors (command 'u').
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/sda: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000b6b0d
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 64 512000 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 64 182402 1464625152 8e Linux LVM
End fdisk output.
Note that the hdparm output appears to conform to your suggestion:
[root@ahprc2 ykarant]# hdparm -i /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Model=WDC, FwRev=51.0AB51, SerialNo=WD-WCAZA4468448
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=2930277168
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
End hdparm output.
The fact that WD insists that one run a utility only under a MS
environment (or FreeDOS, a MSDOS workalike monitor) seems a difficult
way to maintain a system. Will the utility work under Wine/CrossOver?
I assume that the utility will NOT work in MS Win under VirtualBox
because the physical raw hardware is not easily available to the guest
environment.
On the note of formatting, the WD documentation calls for the use of a
parted version later than what is provided with SL 6. I attempted to
rpmbuild --rebuild a later version from Fedora 15, but the following
dependencies appeared:
error: Failed build dependencies:
e2fsprogs-devel is needed by parted-2.3-8.el6.x86_64
gettext-devel is needed by parted-2.3-8.el6.x86_64
device-mapper-devel is needed by parted-2.3-8.el6.x86_64
libuuid-devel is needed by parted-2.3-8.el6.x86_64
libblkid-devel >= 2.17 is needed by parted-2.3-8.el6.x86_64
git is needed by parted-2.3-8.el6.x86_64
Is it safe to do the merry chase down the dependency trail to port a
later parted to SL 6 or will some of these cause SL 6 to fail/become
unstable? Does anyone have a SL 6 port of either parted or gparted that
is more recent than the stock SL 6 versions?
Yasha Karant
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